Web Camera connection

[David Dunbar <ddunbar@geocenter.com>]

I have been trying to get Tom's web camera accessible from Linux with a 
remarkable lack of success. It has reminded me yet again of the 
importance of Reading The Fine Manual. (What did you think RTFM meant?)

I started by getting MPlayer installed. It turns out Konqueror has a 
MPEG4 viewer already. In any event it didn't bring up the video with 
either viewer. Way past time to read the manual. On page 136 of the 
DCS-5300 manual it says the built in web server on the camera uses 
ActiveX and expects Internet Exploder. This explains why Tom is able to 
view the video from Windoze, but I hope he doesn't use IE to surf the 
web from the Windows box. ActiveX is one of the bigger security holes.

It turns out there is are few efforts to support ActiveX on Linux. 
CrossOveroffice had a plugin that was supposed to allow ActiveX use 
from some Linux browsers. The plugin seems to have vanished or been 
incorporated into another product. We may try the demo product yet.

There is a KDE project (reaktivate) to allow Konqueror to use ActiveX 
using Wine. Things get a bit messy at this point. Getting reaktivate 
compiled required:

updates for autoconf and automake - no problem
installing Qt - 2+ hour compile and you need to set it up for threaded 
support
kde arts
kde kdelibs - 1+ hour compile
kde kdenonbeta - select the reaktivate section - make a couple of 
changes for the current Wine that I need to pass to the developers

It still doesn't work. The kdenonbeta could be a clue. It is a 
collection of utilities that are not considered stable enough to be a 
beta.

Probability I missed something setting this up - higher than I would 
like to think.

Does anyone have any idea on what to try next?

David
David Dunbar <ddunbar@geocenter.com>
All men are created equal. After that they are on their own.