Pandora, Will It Do What I Need ?

[suffer1989]

Hey, Ive been following the open pandora movement for quite some time, and i must say, I'm quite thrilled that things almost seem to be complete.
The thing is, would it be unreasonable to assume that the pandora would be able to accept plug and play USB webcams ?
Also, are there any cross platform (ie, on; Windows, Ubuntu, Angstrom ?) webcam clients in the works ?
I wish to be able to chat to my friends and family overseas. I understand there is an integrated microphone, but im unable to spot any microphone ports from the pictures/renders. Does the pandora have a microphone jack ?
Again, ive tried searching, but i couldnt get answers. Thanks for the help

 

[Yigguth]

According to the official site you can.

Internal microphone plus ability to connect external microphone through headset

I think you should be able to use webcams, but maybe someone else can tell you since I'm not sure myself
edit: also, pidgin is capable of webcam chatting so I think you can just use that since pidgin already works in angstrom

 

[suffer1989]

According to the official site you can.

Internal microphone plus ability to connect external microphone through headset

I think you should be able to use webcams, but maybe someone else can tell you since I'm not sure myself
edit: also, pidgin is capable of webcam chatting so I think you can just use that since pidgin already works in angstrom

I wasnt aware of that. Do you have any sources ?

 

[WizardStan]

Pidgin has webcam now? I know they've been saying "it's coming reeeaaaal soon (two months(tm))" but I don't think it's actually working yet.
Ahah: according to the Official Faq, only GTalk pluggin has video and voice chat.
As far as webcam hardware support goes, I'm pretty sure a lot of web cams will work with no problem, either out of box, or simply compiling one of the many different drivers that are available from different sources. My Labtech one has open source drivers that work just fine on my BeagleBoard.
The microphone jack is actually part of the headphone jack. It's called a TRRS jack. It has one more ring than a regular headphone jack; that extra ring is the microphone line. Plug in a regular headphones, and it acts normally. You can get special headphone/microphone combo sets that have this plug on them, or you can buy a really cheap splitter that'll give you individual headphone and microphone ports.

 

[Pleng]

AMsn Supports Webcams.

 

[dflemstr]

AMsn Supports Webcams.

Yeah, but only for MSN...

Kopete does also support webcams but I don't know for which protocols because I don't have a webcam attached to try it out with. It's gotta be a few, at least.

Point is that anything that's telepathy-compatible (such as Empathy) will get full webcam, audio and text support for all of the "open" (aka non-encrypted or otherwise known) protocols, including MSN, ICQ, Jabber, Yahoo etc.

 

[musicalwoods]

According to the official site you can.

Internal microphone plus ability to connect external microphone through headset

I think you should be able to use webcams, but maybe someone else can tell you since I'm not sure myself
edit: also, pidgin is capable of webcam chatting so I think you can just use that since pidgin already works in angstrom

I wasnt aware of that. Do you have any sources ?

2.6.1 adds XMPP Voice and Video support (but not on Windows yet)

That is from the official site. Since it is XMPP, you would be able to do voice and video with Google Talk and Google Mail users. I believe Kopete has had voice and video support for a while as well, hasn't it? There is also Empathy, which is what Ubuntu is defaulting to in 9.10, which supports XMPP voice and video and SIP I believe.

 

[dflemstr]

There is also Empathy, which is what Ubuntu is defaulting to in 9.10, which supports XMPP voice and video and SIP I believe.

Read my post, right above yours ^^

Also, we'll probably see telepathy becoming more and more of a standard Linux communications framework. Currently, Empathy is the only client capable of connecting to telepathy, but Kopete is going to add support for it as well. Telepathy is a multimedia framework that allows all clients to share the same connection systems for various protocols. So, if telepathy gains, say, Skype support, all telepathy clients (like Empathy) also gain Skype support. Very cool.

 

[emil10001]

Getting a webcam to work in Linux is not fun. Many are technically 'supported' but good luck making it work.

 

[Dead1nside]

Getting a webcam to work in Linux is not fun. Many are technically 'supported' but good luck making it work.

It is getting better though, remember the crazy guy who hacked together support for around 100+ webcams all on his own.

I think the problem is that there's so many different combinations of chipsets and sensors that it makes it a mammoth task.

 

[Prometheus]

Getting a webcam to work in Linux is not fun. Many are technically 'supported' but good luck making it work.

Really? This one just needs to be plugged in (and I can vouch for that - I have one).

 

[musicalwoods]

There is also Empathy, which is what Ubuntu is defaulting to in 9.10, which supports XMPP voice and video and SIP I believe.

Read my post, right above yours ^^

But that takes effort D:

Getting a webcam to work in Linux is not fun. Many are technically 'supported' but good luck making it work.

Really? This one just needs to be plugged in (and I can vouch for that - I have one).

Yeah, webcams are like printers in Linux that way. You really should research what you get before you lay down money. :/

 

[craigix]

Getting a webcam to work in Linux is not fun. Many are technically 'supported' but good luck making it work.

I just plugged one in and it worked. Maybe it's a recent update.

There are however many things which don't work, things which you think would work by now, I still get major issues with youtube style stuff. Flickering video, broken or delayed sound.

Thank goodness the Pandora only has one fixed hardware setup.

 

[Alec]

The webcam support actually became pretty decent after they added the gspca drivers into the mainline kernel (version 2.6.23, if I remember correctly), and once the clients started actually using libv4l.

 

[Wheels]

There are however many things which don't work, things which you think would work by now, I still get major issues with youtube style stuff. Flickering video, broken or delayed sound.

I blame Adobe for making Flash suck so hard.
Unless you're using the Gnash plugin, in which case I blame Adobe for making Flash so closed-up.
Aren't I fair? Though they are taking measures to make Flash better across all platforms and support more of them, it seems to take forever-many versions.

Thank goodness the Pandora only has one fixed hardware setup.

Major benefit (and/or limitation) for consoles, that. Develop once, run forever.

 

[emil10001]

Good to know about the webcam. I remember trying to get it working a year or two ago and it was a nightmare.

As for the flash, I haven't been having too many problems with flash on my linux box, although youtube seems to cause more problems than other flash video sites. YouTube also seems to screw up flash for my mac once in a while. Might be worth trying Flash 10: http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/

 

[Trevsweb]

i wanna get a mini bendy usb webcam off ebay. im just hoping it works with msn then i can doss in the garden when its sunny rather than dossing inside on a sunny day