I use Skype on my Win desktop and MacBook as a matter of course now, I rather like to use the video feed via the MacBook when co-working with my team on our screencasts.
Since the desktop box usually runs Ubuntu 9.04, I wanted to try my new QuickCam Pro 9000. The short story is – it works. I had to faff for 15 minutes figuring out the right config for Skype, the winning combo with my old Audigy 2 ZS sound-card was:
- Sound In: QuickCam Pro 9000 (hw:Q9000,0)
- Sound Out: Audigy 2 ZS [SB0350] (hw:Audigy2,0)
- Ringing: Audigy 2 ZS [SB0350] (hw:Audigy2,0)
To test that the Quickcam was running first I used ‘lsusb’ to list the recognised USB devices:
ian@NewMESH:~$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 011: ID 046d:0990 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Pro 9000
and then I ran cheese and had to choose 640×480 to 960×720 to test the video.
My version of the QuickCam 9000 has USB BCD 0x0008 which makes it one of the buggy versions (buggy only for Linux <sigh>), instructions of figuring out if you have one of the fingered models is here. Thankfully I’ve not seen any bugs yet in an hour’s use of audio and video Skype calls. The quick command to get the required ‘bcd’ info is:
ian@NewMESH:~$ lsusb -d 046d:0990 -v | grep bcd bcdUSB 2.00 bcdDevice 0.08
I found some notes for Ubuntu Skype along with the Linux Changelog.
Update – on a subsequent boot Skype had forgotten my audio settings and couldn’t find the webcam. I reset the audio settings (as per above notes), then ran cheese and verified that my webcam was on /dev/video0 (I had to change the resolution before cheese picked up an image though), then I reconfigured Skype and all was well.
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
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