How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

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E3V3A
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How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by E3V3A »

I have two USB web cameras (Acme & Philips) that I'd like to use with Skype.
However, they don't seem to be allowed to use the Skype application (or any other for that matter).

Are there any hacks we can perform to make this work?

PS. There's no other reason for Samsung to block the use of other webcams, except being bastards and filling their pockets!
HW: UE40ES5700SXXH
FW: T-MST10PDEUC-1029.0 Onboot: 1003
rainless
Posts: 16
Joined: Sun Nov 04, 2012 1:13 am

Re: How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by rainless »

You again!

I thought you were an admin or something... but now I remember you're that programmer guy.

Samsung isn't BLOCKING webcams (i don't think...) they're just not including many drivers for them.

Webcams are a tricky thing. Under Windows there's actually a universal webcam driver. Think of this as the "Camera" driver you would find if you're programming in Objective C for Apple or Eclipse for Android.

So you just point your application towards the "camera"... which can be practically any webcam.

There's no such driver for your TV however.

If you had root access you could install ALL the webcam drivers and re-route them to whatever driver samsung defaults too.

I'm surprised my wireless mouse and keyboard work actually... but that's an even more universal driver.
E3V3A
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Joined: Wed Oct 31, 2012 2:31 am
Location: /dev/zero

Re: How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by E3V3A »

Thanks for info, but would you know where to find those drivers?
I'll get root soon and plan to test a whole load of stuff, and 3rd party webcams in one thing. Why should we be forced to pay for something we already have and have paid for twice! (First TV then my webcam and then another!!)
HW: UE40ES5700SXXH
FW: T-MST10PDEUC-1029.0 Onboot: 1003
rainless
Posts: 16
Joined: Sun Nov 04, 2012 1:13 am

Re: How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by rainless »

E3V3A wrote:Thanks for info, but would you know where to find those drivers?
I'll get root soon and plan to test a whole load of stuff, and 3rd party webcams in one thing. Why should we be forced to pay for something we already have and have paid for twice! (First TV then my webcam and then another!!)
If your webcam is Linux compatible than any linux driver should do. I would start with Ubuntu drivers. Then Redhat drivers and then go from there. A good place to start is the manufacturers website. And from there... Sourceforge.
E3V3A
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Location: /dev/zero

Re: How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by E3V3A »

rainless wrote:If your webcam is Linux compatible than any linux driver should do..
I though you would need to compile the drivers for ARM with proper toolchain? Or is there any other devices that is compatible, for module injection?
I suppose it would be more helpful to see if this have already been done for some other TV, so that I'd have a work reference...
HW: UE40ES5700SXXH
FW: T-MST10PDEUC-1029.0 Onboot: 1003
mamaich
Official SamyGO Developer
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Re: How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by mamaich »

No, none of the existing unix camera drivers would work. Samsung uses its own driver model - look into mtd_rwcommon\emps\empCamera\ or mtd_rwcommon\moip\bin for libMoIPCamera*.so, they use C++ classes to provide camera interface to exeDSP (CMoIPCamera() class). Of cause this interface is private.
As far as I see Samsung supports 2 models of cameras: 95xx and 9000. Maybe these numbers are ES9500/ES9000 models which have built-in cameras, I don't know.

So forget about adding your own camera to TV. The only thing you can do - is to find a cheap camera that uses the same hardware chip that Samsung device uses, so it would be understood by your TV, or hope that those drivers are universal and you can tweak them to understand your camera by patching USB VID and PID.
E3V3A
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Re: How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by E3V3A »

Isn't this supposed to be GPL'd stuff!? @Samsung: WTF!
This is very annoying. It make me wanna run my own cam even more!
HW: UE40ES5700SXXH
FW: T-MST10PDEUC-1029.0 Onboot: 1003
mamaich
Official SamyGO Developer
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Re: How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by mamaich »

The code is not GPL. It uses libusb, but other code is proprietary.

From what I see - the camera supported by libMoIPCamera_2058.so/mgfw_2058.bin uses OV2640 camera chip with WM8750L audio codec. The second camera is called "hawk" or "raptor", no more info in files.

So maybe an USB camera that uses OV2640 chip may work on TV too, but I really don't think so. It would be easier to hack an existing Samsung camera to work from Windows,thus reversing Samsung interface.
E3V3A
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Joined: Wed Oct 31, 2012 2:31 am
Location: /dev/zero

Re: How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by E3V3A »

Sound like a good idea. That chip seem very well documented. From first couple of Google hits:

The preliminary datasheet.
Some source code. (?)
(Found from here.)
There are many other much better links also...

We should find out what other Cameras are using this chip... Then plugging these in and see what happens, and if they work, we know they are not blocking using Sammy API, but only USB VID/PID. If they don't we try your way of making the Sammy cams work in ubuntu, and then we can figure what need to be tweaked for Sammy drivers...

Apparently someone got this to work in Ubuntu:
flan_suse at #ubuntu suggested the following script which got my OV2640 camera working. The order of the module loading seems to be important. (I have not verified this for my machine) Of course, the changes can be done via /etc/modules.
Quote:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
# A script to re-enable OmniVision OV2640 Webcam

# Unload the modules first
rmmod uvcvideo gspca_ov519 gspca_main vloopback videodev v4l1_compat v4l2_common

# Reload the required modules
modprobe gspca_ov519
modprobe v4l1_compat
modprobe v4l2_common
modprobe uvcvideo

# Exit
exit 0 
I doubt Samsung dev's bother to re-invent the wheel. There must be simple hack to get other webcams to work.

3 more useful links:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/84270/ov ... t-detected
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UVC (USB Video Class)
http://www.ideasonboard.org/uvc/#devices (List of compatible cameras)


PS. "OV" = OmniVision
HW: UE40ES5700SXXH
FW: T-MST10PDEUC-1029.0 Onboot: 1003
Feuerbard
Posts: 32
Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2012 1:33 am

Re: How to use a 3rd-party web camera with Skype?

Post by Feuerbard »

tv <ES7000 need hardware h.264 encoder , not only another cameras , MSTAR in EH5xxx - ES6xxx not have this encoder , older models with samsung ARM doesnt have this decoder too

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