Old webcam Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Communicate STX not working in Ubuntu 9.04

vlc, mplayer, kdenlive are not able to open my webcam(/dev/video), while aMSN is able to. I have the following webcam:

ID 046d:08ad Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Communicate STX

It seems that Ubuntu recently switched from V4L to V4L2 causing some trouble with some devices. Fortunately there is a solution:

sudo apt-get install ld.so.preload-manager

sudo ld.so.preload-manager /usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so

alternatively (note the lib32. You need to set that on 64bit systems because Skype is still 32 bit ):

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so exec /usr/bin/skype

And now vlc, mplayer and kdenlive work perfectly:

• mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l:width=320:height=240:device=/dev/video0
• vlc v4l:// :v4l-vdev=”/dev/video0″ :v4l-adev=”/dev/audio” :v4l-norm=3 :v4l-frequency=-1 :v4l-caching=300 :v4l-chroma=”" :v4l-fps=-1.000000 :v4l-samplerate=44100 :v4l-channel=0 :v4l-tuner=-1 :v4l-audio=-1 :v4l-stereo :v4l-width=320 :v4l-height=240 :v4l-brightness=-1 :v4l-colour=-1 :v4l-hue=-1 :v4l-contrast=-1 :no-v4l-mjpeg :v4l-decimation=1 :v4l-quality=100
• kdenlive works fine with default options

Links:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam