WriteLarge.com

I spent the better part of the day trying to get the PlayStation EyeToy functioning on Ubuntu. I think I can say I've succeeded. But at the same time, I think I've hit the wall.  The eyetoy camera works. I haven't really messed the microphone, I assume it doesn't work, but that's fine, there are lots of microphone inputs on this machine.
So, I can make pictures appear in _several_ ways. Certain programs use certain drivers that certainly don't always work. And Flash? Fuggedaboutit.
So, here's the problem. Until the world gets over flash, the only thing I'm really interested in doing with my webcam is almost exclusively flash-based. (See also: Seesmic and Ustream.)
And, as near as I can tell, Linux Flash doesn't yet support the Video4Linux driver, which I'm told is the one I've had the most luck with. And, according to the monkeys responding to this post, "Nobody in the Linux community is remotely interested in using webcams with flash."

So here's a breakdown of my experiments today.
First, here's the eyetoy running in Camorama. It's the first time I got any kind of picture out of it. Yes, it's broken, but I felt this was a big first step.

Without making _any_ changes, here's the same driver and camera shooting video via the Ekiga softphone. (I'm certain I could be doing more with my Ekiga Softphone account along with my Vonage Subscription, but maybe not. That's beside the point.) Notice how it's actually capturing an image that is not broken.

So, I loaded up Seesmic!

No good.
I did, however, record this video for you all. It's five seconds of imageless silence. I like to imagine that it's crashing Seesmic's servers the world around.  See! Linux is Easy.

Finally, I installed camstreams, and it grabbed a bunch of driver packages during the install. Damn you KDE! It worked the best out of all of them. At least I can do webcammy stuff via a manual ftp.

In summary, it is my belief that Webcams via Flash for Linux "Just Working" are a long way off. I'm disappointed by reports that those who have built in webcams in there tiny, tiny Linux laptops have discovered that flash will not work for them either.

Linux will not be a competitor to propriety operating systems until it stops sucking in regards flash. "Wa! This is Adobe's Fault!" people often respond to criticisms of the state of Flash in linux.

It might be Adobe's fault, but it's our problem.

I know it's totally 2007 to rip on the Flickr Uploader 3.x, but damn, this is totally broken.

Note that there is no Upload button anywhere on this screen shot. Where's the upload button? Nowhere. I had to take a photo out and drop it back in to make the upload button reappear.

I'm not sure how I made the upload button disappear, it has something to do with the wackadoo window that it brings up when you authorize the application.

It just makes me wonder, does anybody beta test anymore? Look, I'll admit it, I don't. But I'm not Yahoo.

At the December Web414 meeting I gave a presentation on Prism (Don't call it Webrunner.) Thanks to the instructions on this fine post I did a meta-meta thing on my presentation by installing prism into a fresh virtualization of Ubuntu and using GoogleDocs to show my presentation. You can check out that presentation here. What I didn't have in my presentation was any kind of data about the difference between Prism's system footprint versus FireFox's system footprint.

So, here's a non-scientific comparison of Six Tabs in Firefox vs. Six instances of  Prism all doing basically the same thing. First, I launched and logged in to six instances of prism. One each, running Google Docs, Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Last.FM, and Flickr.

And here's the System Resources window.

Then, I launched and opened the same six web sites in tabs in Firefox.

And here's the system resources window in that case:

Summary:

It would appear that reducing your browser's impact on your system is not a significant reason to use Prism. Again, I didn't really study any kind of significant benchmarks beyond these basic screen shots, so if anyone has any scientific data that can prove me wrong, I'd love to see it.  

That doesn't mean, either, than there aren't non-footprint-related reasons to use Prism. Separate processes, easy Desktop integration, reduced UI, and easy deployability are all reasons to put Prism on your machine.

These are all good reasons to encourage Prism's use, but it would appear, unscientifically, that reduced footprint ain't one of them.