A LONE HOBBYIST programmer sitting at his home in France is responsible for adding 235 USB webcams to the list of those supported by Linux. He tells the INQUIRER about this often unknown and unrecognised achievement.
FC: Who are you and what do you do?
MX: My name is Michel Xhaard, I am a Physician and work in Doppler and Ultrasound imaging for years. I am now near 60 years old.
FC: Interesting, as it kind of breaks the "young school kit" stereotype of the Linux advocates. When did you start in this project and why?.
MX: I started working on the "spca50x" project in 2003, when I bought two webcams for my daughters for Christmas but there was no support under Linux for those.
FC: So you decided to take matters in your own hands. How did you know where to start?
MX: After asking the gPhoto team, Till Adam (*hubbahubba.de/) and Thomas G. (*home.tiscali.dk/tomasgc/labtec/) provided me with some useful help to start. Few weeks later we had full support of the Sunplus spca504b chipset in Gphoto -userspace picture support- and Spca50x for video streaming.
FC: Why "GSPCA"? What does it stand for?
MX: "Generic Software Package for Camera Adapters"
FC: So how did the ice ball grow to reach today's 253+ webcams supported with several different chipsets?
MX: Starting with the Sunplus chipset support, I realised that most code in the core driver could be "shareable" to support several webcam chipset(s). That is why the "GSPCA" drivers now support over 250 webcams from different chipset vendors.
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