HOWTO: Making ICM532 chipset based webcams work on breezy

[peter.faller]

By following the excellent instructions on page 1 of this thread, I have a Genius GE111 webcam up and running on Breezy. However, there are a few problems: in camorama or camstream, the colours and brightness are poor, and while the contrast and brightness controls work, the colour, hue and white balance don't. Trying to use streamer for video capture gives a very dark picture. Are there some other controls or settings that I can use to adjust the image? (I get a good picture with good colour balance on Windows). Thanks!

[arnieboy]

By following the excellent instructions on page 1 of this thread, I have a Genius GE111 webcam up and running on Breezy. However, there are a few problems: in camorama or camstream, the colours and brightness are poor, and while the contrast and brightness controls work, the colour, hue and white balance don't. Trying to use streamer for video capture gives a very dark picture. Are there some other controls or settings that I can use to adjust the image? (I get a good picture with good colour balance on Windows). Thanks!

u cant get the windows picture quality simply because windows uses the real proprietary drivers which genius provides. The linux drivers are mostly reverse-engineering attempts and the results quite expectedly cannot be perfect. All these hardware manufacturers simply need to release their specs and drivers to us.. or else the results will be hard to change.

[imranj]

As told before, i am saying it once more, i have Creative Web Cam 550 and i also have being able to find out the chipset its using the Image sensor, thanks to one dude at creative.

Their have being few users who have told about their similar cams but they also had no luck in getting the cam to work.

So can any one pls advise with this information that i have posted below of where i can get a working driver for linux please.

Macronix MX88L60 + Hynix HV7131E (sensor)

So please advise............

[nighttime]

Man, you are so cool, thank you SO much.

[mattjackets]

help please...

cam: logitech quickcam for notebooks. ID 046d:08ae
kernel: 2.6.12-10-k7

the stock kernel driver works as well as the 20060101 spca source....which is not very well. /dev/video1 is created, and demsg looks all well & good, but camorama and gnomemeeting hang when trying to access the cam. xawtv shows nothing.

here's the output from dmesg with the 20060101 driver:

[4296462.793000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/spca5xx.c: USB SPCA5XX camera found. Logitech QC for Notebooks
[4296462.793000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/spca5xx.c: [spca5xx_probe:8435] Camera type JPEG
[4296462.848000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/zc3xx.h: [zcxx_probeSensor:193] sensor 3w Vga ??? 0x0000
[4296462.851000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/zc3xx.h: [zc3xx_config:367] Find Sensor UNKNOW_0 force Tas5130
[4296462.852000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/spca5xx.c: [spca5xx_getcapability:2217] maxw 640 maxh 480 minw 176 minh 144
[4296496.384000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/zc3xx.h: [zcxx_probeSensor:193] sensor 3w Vga ??? 0x0000
[4296519.740000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/zc3xx.h: [zcxx_probeSensor:193] sensor 3w Vga ??? 0x0000
[4296520.016000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/zc3xx.h: [zcxx_probeSensor:193] sensor 3w Vga ??? 0x0000

lines such as:

[4295076.758000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/spca5xx.c: VIDIOCMCAPTURE: invalid format (7)

and

[4295076.864000] /home/matt/spca5xx-20060101/drivers/usb/zc3xx.h: [zcxx_probeSensor:193] sensor 3w Vga ??? 0x0000

occur when trying to use any program to capture video. the readme file in the 20060101 release indicates that my device id is supported.

ideas? please help.

EDIT:
after looking over the info at http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html it would seem that the problem may be that the sensor can't be detected and is being forced to Tas5130 when according to the web it's a PAS202 sensor. can anyone confirm/deny that using the srong sensor info will cause a hang?

EDIT2:
forced the probesensor function to return the code for the PAS202 sensor, and it didn't work. i'm out of ideas again...

[Huub]

Alright, I've followed the instructions and it worked. For 2 images that is (and I didn't change any settings between the working and failing of the webcam). After that I tried fixing it by compiling the latest driver and the 20050906 one, but I keep on getting the following error from 'webcam': "can't get rgb24 data". (since I don't run X on the PC I can only use command line programs). And if it helps anybody understand my problem, another program (camE) gives me the following error: "/dev/video0: no v4l device".

Any chance somebody knows whats going wrong (or what I'm doing wrong)? The webcam still works fine on my Windows PC (and as said, worked well for 2 images on the Linux PC).

[simosx]

Worked like a charm!

Thanks!

[louis_nichols]

Does anyody know how I can adjust image properties? Brightness, contrast and stuff? Possibly while using the webcam in, say kopete... thx

By the way! It works grrreat in kopete. Webcamming cross-platform .

[Chris Tucker]

well my webcam in linux plain sucks.. it worked with the spca5xx driver for a really short while.. now for some reason refuses to do that.. "connection error" yet /dev/video0 only exists when the camera is plugged in.
i found out from gnomemeeting that its only working now with an sn9c10x driver. gnomemeeting works fine with this but quality sucks.

im going to be selling a lot of my stuff i dont need on eBay over hte next little while.. i think that camera is going. it will if i can find some nice cheap webcams that have more than a 3fps/ 120x240 capability under linux >.< .. yea thats about all this ones giving me.. im gonna look for some that actually give results of 15fps+ @ 640x480.

[chiefofthejojos]

arnieboy, first of all thank you so much for the huge amount of support you've put into this issue. You rock!
For me, it fails to compile:

brad@a6ubuntu:~/Projects/spca5xx-20060202$ sudo make CC=gcc-3.4
   Building SPCA5XX driver for 2.5/2.6 kernel.
   Remember: you must have read/write access to your kernel source tree.
make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build SUBDIRS=/home/brad/Projects/spca5xx-20060202 CC=gcc-3.4 modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/lib/modules/2.6.12-10-386/build'
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `modules'.  Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/lib/modules/2.6.12-10-386/build'
make: *** [default] Error 2

any ideas?