Revision of Setup a Webcam from Tue, 08/13/2013 - 18:16

This manual is partially adapted from the Ubuntu community documentation, courtesy of the Ubuntu Documentation Team, licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license.

Checking for Compatibility

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) previously maintained a hardware directory. The FSF has has begun migrating this data to the community supported site h-node.

• The h-node webcam site is a resource that will help users find information about if webcams work with all Free Software. Users are encouraged to submit hardware information to h-node because this will help the community know which hardware is supported and which to avoid.

Testing Your Webcam

Trisquel aims to provide "out-of-the-box" or "just-works" functionality for webcams; you should be able to plug in your webcam and use it right away. To test your webcam, start Cheese (Main Menu → Graphics → Cheese Webcam Booth), a GNOME program for capturing video and stills from a webcam and applying special effects. It uses the gstreamer library, which utilizes the video4linux2 API.

If the performance in Cheese is laggy, you can improve it by lowering the resolution (Edit → Preferences).

Identifying Your Webcam

To find your webcam model, open a terminal and enter the following:

lsusb -v

You will see detailed information about the devices connected to the USB bus. If you scroll through it, you should find some information about your webcam.