Make your webcam suck less

Every webcam sucks. Not because of the webcam itself, but because of the way it's handled by the software. Some programs support only RGB formats, others work only in YUV. Supporting all pixelformats directly by the hardware would increase the price of these low-end articles. Supporting all pixelformats by the drivers would mean to have something similar to gavl in the Linux kernel. The linux kernel developers don't want this because it belongs into userspace. They are right IMO. And since not all programs have proper pixelformat support, you can always find an application, which doesn't support your cam.

Other problems are that some webcams flip the image horizontally (for reasons I don't want to research). Furthermore, some programs aren't really smart when detecting webcams. They stop at the first device (which can be TV-card instead of a webcam) they can't handle.

So the project was to make a webcam device at /dev/video0, which supports as many pixelformats as possible and allows image manipulation (like horizontal flipping).

The solution involved the following:

• Wrote a V4L2 input module for the real webcam (not directly necessary for this project though).
  
• Fixed my old webcam tool camelot. Incredible how software breaks, if you don't maintain it for some time.
  
• Added support for gmerlin filters in camelot: These can not only correct the image flipping, they provide tons of manipulation options. Serious ones and funny ones.
  
• Added an output module for vloopback. It's built into camelot and provides the webcam stream through a video4linux (1, not 2) device. It supports most video4linux pixelformats because it has the conversion power of gavl behind it. Vloopback is not in the standard kernel. I got it from svn with
  
  svn co http://www.lavrsen.dk/svn/vloopback/trunk/ vloopback
  

A tiny initialization script (to be called as root) initializes the kernel modules:

#!/bin/sh
# Remove modules if they were already loaded
rmmod pwc
rmmod vloopback

# Load the pwc module, real cam will be /dev/video3
modprobe pwc dev_hint=3

# Load the vloopback module, makes /dev/video1 and /dev/video2
modprobe vloopback dev_offset=1

# Link /dev/video2 to /dev/video0 so even stupid programs find it
ln -sf /dev/video2 /dev/video0

Instead of the pwc module, you must the one appropriate for your webcam. Not sure if all webcam drivers support the dev_hint option.

My new webcam works with the following applications:

• vlc
  
• ffmpeg
  
• amsn
  
• JMF
  
• Camorama
  
• EffecTV
  
• Camelot :)
  

These are all I need for now. Not working are kopete, flash and Xawtv.