Occasional Thoughts

I have a new toy. Last week I bought an iPod touch. My primary use case is remote controlling media in my home. I already have a HTPC in my living room with access to satellite TV, videos, photos and music. However, I always found it stupid to switch on my TV in order to choose music. I checked choices like Squeezebox Duet or the TEAC WAP-4500. Pretty nice toys starting around 250 EURO. But if you already have a PC, the iPod is about 200+ EURO extra. And it's a nice gadget too. So I ordered one and tried to run the free Remote app from Apple.

After a long painful time I finally got my Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 running for streaming on my Ubuntu Intrepid server. As streaming software I used Motion, an intelligent streaming server that is able to detect motion and only stores images if something happens that is worth imaging.

I myself had a hard time to get it running. I first tried to run it on SuSE Linux 10. But failed because of a series of problems. Then I tried running it on Ubuntu Linux 8.10. Ubuntu has a precompiled package for Motion. The tool is V4L2 aware and is known to work with the uvc-video driver, which is needed for the Quickcam.

Shared Memory is not accessible. Please add the option 'UseShm "true"' into the touch pad section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf