Flushed with the pleasure of my last purchase, I bought another webcam from Dick Smith Electronics, so that I could set up video conferencing on the PC upstairs. This webcam was on special for $20. It is a DSE XH5221. And I got it working. The chipset turns out to be a Pixart PAC7311, which shows up in lsusb as usb id 093a.

 It didn’t run on Ubuntu Gutsy straight away, but it turns out that there is a newer version of gspca that supports it, and I was able to download and install it. There are some nice step-by-step instructions here.

The picture quality is pretty bad, to be honest. Way too contrasty, and with distinct blocky artifacts. However, I can live with that for $20, and I am going to fool with the driver source to see what I can do.

I’ve tested it with Skype, motion, cheese and camorama – works with all of them. I also discovered that if you have been using another USB camera since boot time, all of those programs can get confused (or maybe it’s a V4L problem). But as long as you haven’t plugged another webcam in first, this one works fine.