Embedded Linux Primer

Turns out that the new Gigaware webcam I just bought at Radio Shack for a song and dance only supports a few formats that are mostly unsupported in Linux. The default video format it spits out is YUV420, (also called YV12) is not supported by the usual camera displaying apps in Linux.

After a couple days of research and trial and error, I came across the solution (actually a dude named Brian Johnson on linux-media had the answer!)

You need a compatibility library to convert from the YUV420 to the formats understood by the usual applications: libv4l, available here:
http://people.atrpms.net/~hdegoede/

After that is installed, the following commands work:

$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so. cheese

and

$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! ffmpegcolorspace ! ximagesink

And if you wish to scale the resulting image, do this:

$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! \
ffmpegcolorspace ! videoscale ! video/x-raw-rgb, width=400 ! ximagesink

This is just a placeholder so I won't forget!