Linux Mint Forums

I am running Linux Mint Isadora, but will probably upgrade to some flavor of May soon.

My question is this:

I am a musician, and want to make music videos.

Is there software available for Linux Mint/Ubuntu that would allow me to use a webcam and a USB recording interface for making music videos?
Does "video capture" software do this, including sound recording?
Or is there some way of splicing a sound recording done at the same time into a video?

If so, which webcam should I buy, including both best resolution and what I guess used to be called "frame rate" (jerky video won't cut it!), and WHICH one is (or ones are) the most Linux Mint compatible. I am presuming that Maya will give me a higher likelihood of compatibility.

Note, I don't have an iphone or Android phone, yeah I know they do video pretty well, but I'd have a hard time affording the phone itself, let alone the higher monthly service costs.

Or is there some other flavor of Linux that would be better for this than Linux Mint???
Ubuntu Studio???

If there is some other forum I should be posting this in, please let me know.
But hardware is definitely a factor- I don't want to buy a camera and then find out it's not compatible with Linux or Linux Mint!

I bought my first webcam a couple weeks ago. A Logitech C310. Very inexpensive, but will do 720p at 30 fps. I installed guvcview, plugged the cam into a usb3 port (have loads of them-it's a usb2 cam) and it worked first time recording a vid of me looking at it and waving to test motion. I did not hear any sound from the playback and haven't checked if sound is not working or I was just too quiet. Vid quality is reasonable at 720p for a device I got for $24. I bet you would want something more capable than a C310.

If you are looking to make a professional quality video you probably want something a whole lot more pro than a webcam. The sensors in these things are tiny. A good DSLR camera is capable of video with much better quality. The sensors are about 50 times larger.

Logitech also makes a C510 and C910 ( I think ) The 910 is capable of 1080p, but it won't be the same as watching any professionally recorded 1080p movie.

Thanks for the replies so far. They've helped point me in a good direction, I think.
I did searches on the Logitech B910. It was looking appealing, until I found a negative review that said it had a low frame rate, or that it was hard to adjust the frame rate. And a high frame rate is important for my purposes.
So I did a search with the terms

best webcam "highest frame rate"

and the results were surprising-
The Sony Playstation Eye!!!

AND, I found this:
"PC's running a Linux distribution with the Linux kernel 2.6.29 or later do not need any third-party drivers; the Eye is a plug-and-play device."
THAT is good news!

Update:

I did buy the Sony Playstation Eye.
And I can get it to work with the Gnome Media Player if I go to "TV" and click on "analog" - I can watch live video of myself. Big whoop!
I think the frame rate is fast enough and smooth enough for my purposes.
But Gnome Media Player doesn't have many features, while VLC does... but I can't get VLC to read the device.

So I guess I'm halfway there.

Maybe I'll install the KDE version of Mint 13 so I can run Kaffein.

Go to your package manager and install guvcview see if that capturers you camera better It should show up in you menu under multimidia after install.

Kind of a late response.....



I don't know why I didn't check the thread the same day!!!!

Anyway, I just downloaded and installed guvcview, and it WORKS!!!

The configurations were easy enough that I got both sound and video working with the Sony Playstation cam mentioned earlier.
With VLC, I could get the video working, but not the sound.

Super crisp video it's not, but good enough for the simple music demos I have in mind for it.

Thanks so much!!!

Oh yeah.... it may have been for the best.
The eMachines computer I had got so flaky I retired it. The one I'm on now is an HP Intel 64bit running at about 3 Ghz with 3 gigs of RAM. And at that, the CPU indicator was about maxxed out during recording video!
So it probably wouldn't have worked that well with the old computer that had less than 2/3's the RAM and 2/3's the speed.