Kopete/Webcam Support

Historic page

This page is of historic interest only. The content of the page is obsolete.

This howto aims to show the main steps to use your webcam with Kopete. It's not exhaustive but can help most people.

Supported Protocols (Kopete 1.0.80)

Kopete supports many protocols. A list of them, and details of functionality available, can be found on the Supported Protocols Overview page.

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Webcams need Drivers

First step: Install the drivers

Note

If your webcam already works on Linux, skip this step

First of all, you need to get your webcam working on Linux. This requires a Video4Linux-compatible camera driver to be loaded.

First, activate the video for linux (v4l) support in your linux kernel. If the modules are not automatically installed, they are v4l-compat, v4l-common, and videodev.

Here are some links to common webcam drivers on Linux. If you are buying a new webcam, you may want to check these pages to make sure you get one that's compatible with Linux.

http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html

http://alpha.ovcam.org/ov511/

http://members.chello.nl/~j.vreeken/se401/

http://qce-ga.sourceforge.net/

http://tuukkat.cabspace.com/quickcam/quickcam.html

http://www.linux-usb.org/ibmcam/

http://www.rastageeks.org/ov51x-jpeg/index.php/Main_Page

http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/ (Phillips USB Webcam Driver)

Compile and install your driver (if necessary) according to the instructions on the site for your driver.

Second step: webcam with Kopete

Open the Kopete configuration dialog. Go to the device section. Your webcam should turn on and you should see the picture in the preview. If you have a problem with your driver, add yourself to the video group using the KUser user administration tool, make sure your camera driver is working, and try again.

Third step: real webcam use

• Open Jabber or WLM chat with one of your buddies. Use the Send webcam option in File menu to send your webcam stream to your buddy. You should get the preview of your stream in a new dialog.
• Alternatively you can choose the desired action in the context menu of the contact.

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Troubleshooting

My camera is a no-name (generic) brand. How can I find the appropriate driver? You will probably find the chipset brand using the "lsusb" command as the root user. Note that some no-name and cheap camera brands don't work on Linux at all, though the spca5xx driver supports an increasing number of chipsets.

I can't receive any webcam stream from my buddies; what's wrong? MSN webcam support is not NAT-friendly. Check your NAT router and forward the MSN Webcam port to your computer port on which Kopete is listening for webcam (see the next item).

Detailed listing of ports to forward for MSN Microsoft provides this info in the following link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324214/en-us

Service	TCP ports	UDP ports
Incoming voice (computer to computer)	6901	6901
Voice (computer to phone)	-	6801, 6901, 2001-2120
File transfer (receiving a file)	6891-6900	-

Note

In the "File transfer" line, 10 ports are opened (ports 6891 through 6900 inclusive) so that you can perform 10 file transfer operations at a time. If you open only one of these ports, you can only transfer one file at a time.

I can receive or send but not both at the same time; port 6891 has been opened for TCP/UDP packets It seems that you had to forward 6892 (udp and tcp) as well to get both directions working.

How do I receive webcam images through the Yahoo! protocol? You need to have the jasper application reachable through your PATH environment variable. The Jasper application is provided by OpenSUSE from v.10.1 (though not installed by default).

For Ubuntu, use the Synaptic package manager to install the jasper runtime package which is called libjasper-runtime.

Can we expect to see UVC cameras support (http://linux-uvc.berlios.de/)? Kopete shows only green screen when you try to use the camera. Other software (Skype, aMSN) work fine with this driver. UVC camera (Logitech 9000 Pro) is reported as working in Kopete 0.12.7, (Ubuntu Hardy 8.04) out of the box.