One man writes Linux drivers for 240+ USB webcams

Supplement to Wily's introduction. The GSPCA driver developed by Michel Xhaard is in fact a collection of low end webcam chip drivers. Even some webcam driver development project gave up their work and merge their code to GSPCA. GSPCA should be the core driver for most of the cheap webcams. For high-end webcam, some of the vendor like Logitech / V-Gear has been adopted the USB Video Class to make their webcam be ompatible with the standard. Those webcam may claim that they are driver-less to Windows and Mac platform as the UVC driver has been built inside the OS. A open source project called Linux-UVC has been started to work to achieve the UVC standard. I think GSPCA and UVC will be the most two common webcam driver in the future. However, their implementation of Video4Linux API is different. GSPCA provides V4L1 only. And UVC provides V4L2 only. Not all video viewer implemented both of the API. Therefore, it raise compatible issue between camera and viewer. Another problem is the image format provided by the webcam. In the past, formats like YUV420,YUYV are quite common and supported by most viewer. But now some webcam use compressed format like JPEG / MJPEG. Only few viewer could adopt those formats. Like my Logitech Quickcam for Notebook Pro, only MJPEG and YUYV(with a very strange resolution : 1024x576) are provided. Camstream / xawtv is not compatible with that camera.