This is never a good thing to read, but sometimes developers simply have disagreements that are not able to be compromised on. Never fear though, there are many other Web cams that do in fact, work quite well with Linux.

Okay, this is not going to be pleasant. I’ve decided to discontinue supporting PWC, the Philips webcam driver for Linux. The reason is continual disagreement between me and the kernel maintainers on the binary-only part that PWC has, in order to use the webcam to its full potential. This has now reached a point where I’m throwing in the towel.

As most of you probably know, the driver consists of two parts, PWC which is available as source and part of the kernel, and PWCX, the binary-only decompressor part. PWC itself works, but with limitations in framerate and resolution; to get the full benfits of the cam, you must use PWCX.