by Calvin Robinson on November 18, 2008.

Okay so this took me all day to figure out.

Basically, Flash 9 had great webcam support – but lousy sound support. And in Flash 10 they fixed sound support, but broke older webcam support (by adding V4L2, I believe they removed V4L1 support. Or vise versa).

Well I tried compiling my own kernal, with pcw support. Tried using EasyCam to install my webcam drivers. I mean, I’m using a Logitech QuickCam, one of the most popular brands in the world – you’d think it would be supported.

I eventually fixed it, and this is how;
Downloaded and make installed V4L1 libraries.
Now before I have to use the command export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so and then run firefox or flock from this terminal window.
This is basically telling flock not to use the newer V4L2, but V4L1 instead.

The webcam works fine in all other applications, it’s just Flock/Firefox that are affected. So all I’ve had to do is make a startup script for them, so they export everytime. I know it’s only a workaround. But it works for me.