So, I finally decided to get for myself a budget webcam, just for the fun of it. I eventually settled for one which stated on the box to have Linux drivers. It’s not often that a product such as this would ship with Linux drivers. After a little thought, I got it.

Turns out that there wasn’t any clear instructions on how to install the driver, since it didn’t ship with any shell script, or any instructions on where to park the 3 files it came with. After a little while crawling the web, I installed a few programs and managed to get it working. All without the manufacturer’s drivers!

It wasn’t at all smooth sailing on the windows side. In fact, where I eventually got it to work in Linux, I couldn’t even get it to cooperate in Windows. I installed the bundled software, which went smoothly. Fired it up, and 10 seconds later, the video feed froze. A minute after that, it complained that it could not capture the video grabber. Even uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers didn’t help. Viewing the twain video feed via VLC resulted in a blue screen.

This is sucky. For once, a device worked noticeably better in Linux. Still, I would have preferred it to work without a hitch in both operating systems

Wonder if I can get a refund for this “defective” piece of hardware.