Random thoughts...

I had problems getting Skype video to work on my Ubuntu box.  What I eventually did was to lean back on v4l1.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so ./skype

I'm moving to Skype 4.0 and wanted to make sure I tracked this change.

Also blogging about my old Acer Aspire 5920g when trying to get the CrystalEye Webcam to work on my old Gutsy Gibbon.  I had a few scripts written and also installed uvcview (I believe).

To get the camera to record, I used this line:

ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 320x240 -r 24 -i /dev/video0 -f avi filename.avi

Installed luvcview and ran this line to get webcam to capture snapshots.

luvcview -f yuv

You will need libsdl for this to work as well as the uvcvideo drivers.

From lsmod:

uvcvideo, compat_ioctl32, videodev, v4l1_compat, v4l2_common

This blog might help.

$ wget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Investigation/uvc/luvcview-20070512.tar.gz$ tar zxvf luvcview-20070512.tar.gz$ cd luvcview-20070512$ make$ make install







Just backported Pidgin 2.7.9 on... Gutsy!

I find it very funny that I'm too freaking lazy to upgrade my Ubuntu install on my Acer laptop. It's stuck on Gutsy Gibbon which is really ages ago. When MSN stopped working, I just knew eventually I would have to roll up my sleeves and cut myself a custom release.

I got the pidgin source packages from Ubuntu Natty (I believe) and rebuilt the damn thing. What is impressive is that it's taken me a very short time to get this working. I took painstaking time rebuilding dependencies of Pidgin for my previous backporting effort so it seems that the pidgin releases match those dependencies more.

I only fixed the control files to match the versions I have and changes compat to 4 (5 will probably work). Then on rules, I disabled video and voice (I am so not going to backport the gstreamer libraries!).

A couple of minutes later, I have pidgin 2.7.9 on Gutsy and it's worked like a charm.