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[goney3]

It seems the new release candidate of Adobe Flash v10 will include Video4Linux v2 camera support!  (i.e. What the XO uses)

Which leads me to ask... will uploading with direct capture to Youtube work now?

Im currently waiting for 761 to be released Friday, clean install, then will try this out (since i dont know how to remove the v9 of Adobe Flash)

You can read more about v10's release candidate here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Or download and fiddle with it yourself here:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

[mbs348]

when flash 10 works, Ive found it to be really nice.  But sometimes, some sites don't recognize it as a more advanced version of flash, and complain about not having an up to date version.....its really annoying.

[goney3]

ok, under Joyride 2467 I get a purple zig-zag image under Youtube upload live-capture, etc. (flash v10 r12)

I guess the driver needs to be updated for v4l2, or provide some kind of adjusting feature on the olpc side... that or cross your fingers and wait for Adobe Flash v10 Final and hope its supported

[Gabey8]

It seems the new release candidate of Adobe Flash v10 will include Video4Linux v2 camera support!  (i.e. What the XO uses)

Which leads me to ask... will uploading with direct capture to Youtube work now?

Im currently waiting for 761 to be released Friday, clean install, then will try this out (since i dont know how to remove the v9 of Adobe Flash)

You can read more about v10's release candidate here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

Or download and fiddle with it yourself here:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Great news! When I can consistently use the XO for YouTube, I will be very pleased.

It's not that I'm a regular YouTube user, but I do post on some hockey forums and people frequently post links to game clips. I use Opera on my XO, and I haven't got Flash set up for it. I do have Flash set up for Browse, but as the images are choppy I rarely try to access video with Browse.

With the updated Flash, I wonder if we can post video to things like Justin.tv? I can get the audio to work on that, but not the video. Or is it too resource-intensive for the XO to be able to stream both video ad audio to Justin.tv?

[overbyte]

Flash 10 (version 10,0,15,3) still does not work with the XO's webcam.  I have Sugar build 767 installed.  When I visit a website that uses Flash in a video chat application (www.vyew.com), and I click to activate the webcam video, Flash pops up a security setting dialog asking for permission to let the website connect with my camera, but that Flash dialog window is frozen.   It won't respond to clicking, not even to clicking on the Close button.  The only way to close the dialog is to reload the page or navigate away.    I also get the same behavior when I right-click inside the Flash movie at the Adobe Flash Player "about" page on Adobe's web site and click on the Settings menu item there -- the popup settings dialog freezes on top of the movie.

To rule out that this is a problem with Browse rather than Flash Player plugin itself, I launched Opera which I had previously installed on my XO.   Opera is worse.  It won't even play the Flash movie at Adobe's "about" page and doesn't display the "Click to Play" message.   When I visit the page using Flash, I see error messages at Terminal from Opera, which I launched with the command "Opera &" to let it run as a separate process, saying that a module failed and is being ignored, so I suspect Opera is having trouble loading or initializing Flash Player 10 plugin.

Looking at the output of the "top" command in Terminal, I see that there is very little memory available after Opera has loaded, so perhaps the little XO just doesn't have enough RAM to load Flash Player 10 when Opera is also running.   I don't know why "top" also reports that swap memory is not available.   Perhaps using swap would let Opera at least load FlashPlayer in virtual memory and run, although at poor speed.  Does the XO come configured to use the solid-state hard disk drive for a swap partition?  Must all running processes fit within the physical RAM space only?

Even if Opera is too large to run with Flash Player 10, at least the smaller Browse browser can run Flash Player 10, so I would hope that someone at OLPC keeps some pressure on Adobe's Flash Player team to get Flash Player 10 working on the XO.   Or, if the problem lies in the Browse activity, then Sugar team should try to get Browse working with Flash Player 10's use of the webcam.

[overbyte]

After a lot of experimentation, I was able to turn on the XO's camera in Flash Player 10 (release 10,0,15,3), but it showed a bad video image consisting of alternating black and purple diagonal lines, which did respond by changing as I moved my hand in front of the lens.  The image looks like what you see when an old-fashioned analog TV set has its horizontal scan "hold" adjusted wrong.  To get the camera active, I had to do the following:  browse to a Flash application web page (www.vyew.com) and right-click in the Flash movie; click on the Settings item in the popup menu; the Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog appears, but it doesn't respond to mouse clicks, so I had to navigate by using Tab to get to the desired widget and Enter to "click" it; then I navigated to the video preview box in the Camera popup window by Tabbing and Entering.  Then the camera turned on but with bad video.    The camera works well in the XO's Record activity, so it's not bad hardware but rather bad software that's at fault.

So, there are 2 problems:
1.   Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog does not respond to mouse clicks, although it does respond to tab navigation.
2.   The driver used by Flash Player on the XO does not correctly synchronize with the scan rate of the camera circuit in the XO.

My XO seems to be running a customized version of Fedora 10.  The "uname -a" command says:
Linux ...mac address shows here... 2.6.25-20080925.1.olpc  f10b754367d7065.
The Flash Player Settings says the camera is "cafe ccic (V4L2)".  That's probably the driver that needs to be fixed for the XO.

On my Ubuntu 8.04.1 computer, Flash Player 10 does respond to mouse clicks in the Settings dialog, in contrast with the XO's behavior.   It's the same version of Flash Player on both machines, so the bug seems to be in Fedora on the XO.   I don't have a camera for that machine, so I don't know how Flash Player 10 would view the camera on the Ubuntu machine, but even if I install one, it may not have the same video chip as in the XO, so it's not fruitful to try.  The objective is getting the XO's camera to work in Flash Player.

It sure would be nice to have the XO capable of running rich Internet applications using the camera on the Flash platform.   I hope someone can figure out where the problem with the camera lies and get it fixed for a future release.

[pavelkolodin]

Hello.
I have equal problem - my Flash 10 does not respond to mouse clicks, hovewer various youtubes ok

But in my case it's big laptop, not XO.

Thank you.

[whimzerchee]

After a lot of experimentation, I was able to turn on the XO's camera in Flash Player 10 (release 10,0,15,3), but it showed a bad video image consisting of alternating black and purple diagonal lines, which did respond by changing as I moved my hand in front of the lens. 

Greetings,
I'm using Ubuntu setup from Teapot's thread and enjoying video conferencing with my friends via a Flash app. The video feed was as you described it at first.



The solution I found to fix it (which came from a Skype thread somewhere) was this command...
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4lconvert.so.0:/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so
into xinitrc (/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinit/xinitrc for me) also just typing that into a command prompt then running Firefox from within that prompt works. I don't remember if I had to install the v4l libs, but if I did the package is libv4l-0

now it's...


The OLPC's cam feed is on the lower left.

However, it's very far zoomed in. This is what it should look like...



That's the record app, but the video zoom level in it is the same as in Skype, xawtv, etc. With Flash, it's like there is a digital zoom effect, or only small frame of the webcam is shown, possibly a resolution setting problem? Anyone know how to fix this?

[mavrothal]

The solution I found to fix it (which came from a Skype thread somewhere) was this command...
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4lconvert.so.0:/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so
into xinitrc (/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinit/xinitrc for me) also just typing that into a command prompt then running Firefox from within that prompt works. I don't remember if I had to install the v4l libs, but if I did the package is libv4l-0

now it's...

This is VERY impresive!

Could you be a bit more specific though?
Are you using Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10? In 8.10 'xinitrc' appears to be in /etc/xdg/xfce4/ and not in /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinit/ in Teapot's Ubuntu. Which one is it in your setup and do you have any idea, if different, why?
Also, where in that file the addition was placed. I assume before the segment that say's something to the extend: the following lines are ignored if you xave an xfce4-session.
Finally manual execution from the terminal of "export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4lconvert.so.0:/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so" results in a bunch of "can not load /usr/lib/...."
The original skype thread mentioned, refers to manual installation (resulting in different paths) and 2.6.27 kernel (OLPC/Ubuntu has 2.6.25). Did you actually use that method?
For the record I do have libv4l-0 installed via synaptic.

Would be great if you could provide some more information so the hack can be reliably reproduced.
Thanks.

[ChristophD]

whimzerchee, very nice work indeed!

[mavrothal]

so adding

Code:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4lconvert.so.0:/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so

in the /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc file (just above the '# Run xfce4-session if installed'
 line) indeed allows Skype to broadcast proper video from XO-ubuntu.
Unfortunately 2-way video conferencing still crashes Skype after 1-2 sec
Do I miss something else?

[whimzerchee]

Would be great if you could provide some more information so the hack can be reliably reproduced.
Thanks.

Greetings,
Sorry, I had the directory wrong. I wiped my OS, then reinstalled Ubuntu 8.10 using Teapot's thread here so I could replicate what I did and track it. This is all I did...

sudo aptitude install libv4l-0
sudo aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree
sed '/^#!\/bin\/sh/a export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4lconvert.so.0:/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so' /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc | sudo tee /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc

Then I restarted and it worked. Beyond that I overclocked it for better performance.

[whimzerchee]

so adding

Code:

export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4lconvert.so.0:/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so

in the /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc file (just above the '# Run xfce4-session if installed'
 line) indeed allows Skype to broadcast proper video from XO-ubuntu.
Unfortunately 2-way video conferencing still crashes Skype after 1-2 sec
Do I miss something else?

No Sir or Ma'am, not that I know of. I'm able to broadcast the OLPC's video with Skype but yes it crashes instantly for me when I try to do two way. Since Flash video is working I'm going to try http://www.tokbox.com/ as an alternative to Skype.