But as always, there is a catch: if you use the latest Nvidia drivers (if you have an Nvidia card of course) you probably have no DGA support because it got dropped (something with DGA needing a static frame buffer address and dynamic memory management on a graphics card – whatever) ad when you try to run something like ‘xawtv’ you get a warning and only a black image.
This is xawtv-3.95, running on Linux/x86_64 (2.6.29-gentoo-r1) WARNING: v4l-conf is compiled without DGA support. /dev/video0 [v4l2]: no overlay support v4l-conf had some trouble, trying to continue anyway Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-ledfixed-medium-r-*--39-*-*-*-c-*-*-*" to type FontStruct no way to get: 384x288 32 bit TrueColor (LE: bgr-)
The reason for this is the fact that xawtv and some others try to get the data through the V4L interface which most of the time comes with a DGA display method… which doesn’t work… which means your webcam is working but you can’t see it…
This is silly ofcourse and luckely, players like mplayer can use the V4L2 interface as well which allows it to display the feed without a DGA interface. For example to test using V4L2 and mplayer type:
mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=352:height=288:device=/dev/video0 -fps 15
Have fun with your webcam on linux! ^^