asus w5f and its webcam

a friend of my girlfriend and me moved to london. my girlfriend claims for skype. no problem. installation was pretty easy. ok, here you go darling make your call.. strug, there is no video signal…mmh. -1 on here ubuntu-is-a-windows-replacement-list 🙂

today i found some time and yes skype has a video signal now. after googling i found eldragon’s post which did the job:

in short: LD_PRELOAD needs to be set in order to tell skype to use v4l (video for linux)

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype

iVinyl on ubuntu – it works!

motivation

two x-mas ago my brother present me the terratec  iVinyl so that i can record all my LPs. i didn’t got it to work and postpone this work:) this year me girlfriend presents me something similar, so i was motivated to try it once more and… yepp… it works!

setup

this year i’m using ubuntu 8.10. i pluged it in and see if iVinyl is detected properly (cat /proc/asound/cards):

0 [Intel          ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
                      HDA Intel at 0xfeb3c000 irq 16
1 [iVinyl         ]: USB-Audio - PhonoPreAmp iVinyl
                      Terratec PhonoPreAmp iVinyl at usb-0000:00:1d.0-1, full speed

fine. good starting point. but wait. still no recording.

ubuntu alsa and pulse audio config

i googled and found Interpid Sound Solutions. after following this post and installing the missing parts i got my audio to work with pulse and alsa.

audacity config

i tried to use arecord but my iVinyl did not recognized it as a PCM device. so i start playing with audacity. in the preferences > audio i/o settings i pointed the input to iVinyl device.

still no sound:( mmh. ?&%”!. ouch. audacity itself has a microphone control. and guess what. yes the default value was zero. after changing that it finally works!

iVinyl settings

capacity: 430
input level: min