Web Camera for stable

[Oliver Fromme]

Anton Nikiforov <anton at nikiforov.ru> wrote:
 > Does someone have some web cam working with Free BSD-stable?
 > What cameras you are using and what software? (picture download or video 
 > stream - it doesnot matter)

Sure.  I have a standard cheap PAL camera with composite
output (cinch connector).  It's connected to a PCI video
capture card witg bt848 / bt878 chip (only few bucks on
eBay), using the bktr(4) driver.  Works perfectly fine
with all versions of FreeBSD, from 4.x to current.

 > I was trying to google the net and find solutions with gphoto and vid.
 > All this solutions are based on old cameras that i cannot find on the 
 > market.

Simple PAL (or NTSC) cameras can be found for small prices
everywhere (well, at least over here in Germany).  They're
commonly used for surveillance purposes etc.  There are
several German shops who sell them for about 50 Euros.

Another possibility is to use an IP camera, which are about
100 Euros.  They are completely OS-independent and connect
directly to an ethernet network (some also have wireless
WLAN); they support standard protocols such as HTTP, FTP
and telnet.

USB cameras are very, very cheap, but they're really not
worth much.  The quality is often bad, and you never can
tell for sure whether you can make them work with FreeBSD,
except by actually trying it.

Best regards
   Oliver

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Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
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