sane-qcam(5)

💖 sane-qcam(5) — the Connectix QuickCam backend, bestie 💖

✨ NAME ✨

okay so sane-qcam is the SANE backend for Connectix QuickCam cameras, no cap.

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

The sane-qcam library implements a SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) backend that provides access to Connectix QuickCam cameras. It's giving scanner-access realness.

🎀 DEVICE NAMES 🎀

This backend expects device names of the form:

port

where port is the I/O port address at which the device resides. This address is normally specified in hexadecimal using C syntax (e.g., 0x37b) and may be prefixed with the letter "u" (e.g., u0x37b) to force the backend to access the camera in uni-directional mode.

🌈 CONFIGURATION 🌈

The contents of the qcam.conf file is a list port addresses that may be connected to a Connectix QuickCam. Empty lines and everything starting from a hash mark (#) up to the end of a line are ignored. A sample configuration file is shown below:

0x37b  # /dev/lp0
0x378  # /dev/lp1
u0x278 # /dev/lp2 forced in uni-directional mode
0x3bc  # /dev/lp0 (alternate address)

In general, it is safest to list only the port addresses that really correspond to a QuickCam. For example, if one of the listed addresses actually connect to a printer, then starting up this backend will cause the printer to perform a device reset (which is generally undesirable).

⚠️ bestie, that printer reset is generally undesirable — so don't be messy with your port list.

🍓 FILES 🍓

• /etc/sane.d/qcam.conf — the backend configuration file (see also the description of SANE_CONFIG_DIR below).
• /usr/lib64/sane/libsane-qcam.a — the static library implementing this backend.
• /usr/lib64/sane/libsane-qcam.so — the shared library implementing this backend (present on systems that support dynamic loading).

🦋 ENVIRONMENT 🦋

• SANE_CONFIG_DIR — this environment variable specifies the list of directories that may contain the configuration file. On *NIX systems, the directories are separated by a colon (:), under OS/2, they are separated by a semi-colon (;). If this variable is not set, the configuration file is searched in two default directories: first, the current working directory (".") and then in /etc/sane.d. If the value of the environment variable ends with the directory separator character, then the default directories are searched after the explicitly specified directories. For example, setting SANE_CONFIG_DIR to "/tmp/config:" would result in directories tmp/config, ., and /etc/sane.d being searched (in this order).
• SANE_DEBUG_QCAM — if the library was compiled with debug support enabled, this environment variable controls the debug level for this backend. E.g., a value of 128 requests all debug output to be printed. Smaller levels reduce verbosity.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

David Mosberger. periodt.

💀 BUGS 💀

Support is currently limited to the color version of the QuickCam. The black-and-white camera is starting to work too, but I don't believe it works in all cases yet. Reportedly, acquiring images of certain sizes work fine, but others result in shifted images (sounds like a problem due to byte-padding).

🔥 okay but also: the program needs root-privileges since it needs to be able to access the camera's I/O ports. Root privileges are the vibe here, unfortunately.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

sane(7)

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That's the sane-qcam(5) page, dated 14 Jul 2008, from SANE Scanner Access Now Easy — mwah 💋