Most of our readers know I volunteer for an educational charity on Fridays. I install software on computers which are then given out to students. We have a “special needs” married couple who came in about a year ago and took a Linux box. They wanted to get their webcam running on it. After a couple of weeks I managed to get it more or less working. I thought it might be a good idea to pick up one and see if there were something more I could do with it.
Since we have a big box store going out of business in Canada (it is still operating in the States) the logical conclusion would be to look for something cheap. Well let’s just say the cheapest one they had was only $2.00 off. It was still cheaper than the other outlets in town.
I had installed some software on my Linux box and the Mac Mini I have some time earlier. My Linux box is currently having hardware trouble so I first tested it on the Mini. The Macam software didn’t recognise the camera. As a result I went searching for other software which would work. I found VirtualEyes, EvoCam, and ManyCam.
It turns out EvoCam is pretty good. The version I picked up is a demo. They want the users to register the software (and presumably send money). My attitude is I’d rather maintain my privacy thank you very much. It’s the same reason I won’t sign up for a .Mac account or for the App Store.
VirtualEyes is pretty cool. It lets the user setup a green screen and superimpose their image over a background.
ManyCam does a whole bunch of things. It adds effects to the video stream coming from the webcam and it allows the result to be shared with various applications which normally demand exclusive use of the webcam.
With three applications showing the hardware works I took the device into the lab on Friday to test it on a Linux machine. It worked well (but slow) on the machine I was using. Of course the computer was a recycled machine so that was only natural. I found VLC was also able to take input from the webcam. There was a setting which changed the nature of the stream. It was called “sigma”. When I got the webcam home I found that setting was missing from the OS X version. One of the people I was working with at the lab suggested I try iChat and Photo Booth. Both worked.
The last thing I tried on the Mini was the speech recognition. It works better under 10.6 than it did when I tried it under 10.4 a couple of years ago. However it still has some issues which need to be worked out.
I forgot to mention a couple of things. I wasn’t able to get it to work with a virtual machine running Kubuntu. I may have messed up something there. The resolution of the camera is 640×480. It has a series of adjustible LEDs for night work. Finally, the Windows only software which comes with it will let the camera take pictures of up to 1.3 MegaPixels. The base opens so the webcam can hook on to various monitors and laptop screens. The camera also turns in three dimensions. There appears to be a rotating manual focus. There is also a button on top which I haven’t figured out yet. Finally the webcam has a USB 2.0 interface and the general advice on the web is not to connect it through a USB hub but to connect it directly to the computer.
