Yesterday I bought a high-quality and cheap webcam at IT Square. It was only just 450 baht for 1.3 megapixel. It worked great on MS Windows at the shop and I hoped it would work just like that on Linux. Unfortunately, this model is too good for Linux. There is no open source driver yet. To be exact, lsusb told me my webcam is 0c45:6270 Microdia which uses Sonix SN9C201. After asked Google for a while, I found several solutions. The most promising one is at Linux Project. Unfortunately again, this driver is only available in binary only or in other words, it is a closed source driver. Moreover, the only available for Ubuntu Gutsy is the trial release with time-limited. Time-limited means this driver only runs on even day. Today is March 14, 2008 so this driver works great. It is possible to obtain time-unlimited release if I donate 7 USD to the developer for a copy of the latest version. Note that 7 USD will result in only one version without warranty. If the version I got has some bugs, I will have to pay another 7 USD to get a better version. According to the price, 7 USD is 50% of the price. It's over for me. I like to upgrade my kernel every time Ubuntu offered me. That means I could buy new webcam after upgrading kernel twice.

Never give up! Never surrender! I found the red pill.

...you can keep waiting, hoping, praying by your bedside that someone will add support for your webcam,

we simply offer you the choice of the "RED PILL"

Morpheus: The Matrix

Instead of spending the rest of life to wait for someone to make a driver, why do not make it yourself! Microdia group is a group of people who bought Microdia products and they really want to make it work on Linux. Most of them are not hardcore programmer, kernel hacker or anything similar. However, they may take some important role to give feedback. Comprehensive documents are available in this group to help anyone to reverse engineer any webcam driver for Windows and reproduce the protocol in Linux kernel. Not too difficult. This group is very active! If you have Microdia products, please join us.

The state of the art of my webcam is its init function. Not bad.