Lorin Olivier’s GL860 driver
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008Lorin Olivier has created a kernel driver for his GL860 webcam. Lorin’s device is the 05e3:f191 variant, whereas mine is the more common 05e3:0503. There are differences between the devices that we don’t have much of a grasp on. The code we’ve written for each device is incompatible with the other, even though there are some protocol similarities.
Lorin reports that his driver works reasonably well with his device – it works with camorama, xawtv, ekiga, amsn, mplayer and xsane. He has also determined how to adjust various camera settings (luminosity, saturation, hue, sharpness, retrolighting, mirror effects, light source, AC power frequency).
Although Lorin doesn’t actually own an 0503 device, he’s attempted to implement support for it based on my earlier efforts. Given that I didn’t get very far, it probably doesn’t work that well. I haven’t had a chance to try it, but there’s no point me sitting on this any longer.
It’s in my git repository in the nvgl subdirectory:
git://projects.reactivated.net/~dsd/gl860.git (gitweb).
All credit goes to Lorin here – thanks! He’s done a great job, but do remember that its experimental code based on a reverse-engineered protocol, so don’t expect it to be flawless.