Cheap USB Camera 0c45:62c0 Microdia

The built in camera on my laptop bust and I had an important Skype call first thing in the morning. I was staying at a Hotel in South Kennsington so went out to a local shop to buy a webcam. Armed with my laptop so as to get one that worked with linux. Well specifically with skype. I run OpenSuse 10.3 on a Del XPS M1330. I tried a logitech quick cam before with only limited success so I was suspicious. However the Dell built in camera worked fine on everything: Skype, kdetv, Ekiga etc.

The one I bought says "Sunny" on it but is a generic chinese made camera. It has a ring of blue leds controlled by variable resistor on a bump on the cable, and can clip on the laptop or stand on a table.

On plugging it in lsusb identifies it as "0c45:62c0 Microdia"

After some fiddling, much to the amusement of the man in the newsagents where I bought it, I eventually found that running luvcview -d /dev/video0 -f yuv -s 640x480 managed to knock v4l and the camera in to action and after focussing I got a good picture. Skype did not have much to adjust once it found the camera. Not got it to work with Ekiga consistently but works fine with Skype and kdetv. Also not figured out how to get the flash plugin (eg facebook video) to work. Well I'm not the only one with that problem.