Using The Audiovox DC400 DV Camcorder With Linux

I was going through my collection of random electronic devices recently, and came across an Audiovox DC400 DV camcorder that I had acquired awhile back. The DC400 is an affordable camcorder with limited functionality... perfect for a webcam. I decided to get it set up on my Fedora Core 6 linux machine so that I could use the video conferencing functionality of Ekiga.

Unfortunately, the DC400 does not work with an out of the box Fedora Core 6 install, so I needed to figure out how to get it up and running. There wasn't a lot of information on the web about using this camera with Linux, so hopefully this page will help somebody else with the same problem.

The easiest way I know of to find a driver for a new device is to get the manufacturer and device ID from lsusb, so I plugged the camera into my USB bus and ran lsusb. Depending on what mode the camera is in, there are two different values that lsusb will report. The default mode seems to be 'MASS STORAGE', which will produce the following output:

[root@desktop ~]# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 017: ID 055f:c361 Mustek Systems, Inc.

The other mode, which is the one that you need in order to use the DC400 as a webcam, is 'PC CAM'. You can switch modes by hitting the 'FUNC' button on the control panel of the camera. The output from lsusb after switching modes is:

[root@desktop ~]# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 016: ID 055f:c360 Mustek Systems, Inc. Mustek DV 4000

A little digging around in Google produced the homepage for the GSPCA/SPCA5XX linux webcam driver, which listed the Mustek DV 4000 as a supported device. I downloaded the suggested driver package for my kernel version, compiled it, and installed it with no problems.

wget http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca50x/Download/gspcav1-20061216.tar.gz
tar xfz gspcav1-20061216.tar.gz
cd gspcav1-20061216
make && make install

Once I got through the difficult part of identifying the required driver, the rest was easy, I didn't even have to add any modprobe configuration lines because the appropriate module is loaded automatically when you switch to 'PC CAM' mode.