Together with Johan (project 338) we successfully established a video conference between France and Finland. Time to try new things on the EFIKA, webcams, VIC, Ekiga...

First step I've successfully compiled the spca5xx driver needed for a Labtec Webcam Pro device. The latest version works right out the box, you just need your kernel sources/headers (tested with a 2.6.19 version). To get the right colors simply load the driver with "force_rgb=1".

This will allow you to get a cristal clear picture of the Père-Noël with spcaview :-)



The serious things begin now. The Debian's Ekiga package works well. So it's now time to link two machines on the home LAN. The EFIKA called my Mac (running xmeeting) and the result was really great. Just have a look below.



The final goal was reached when Johan's get Ekiga working on his side. And the Père-Noël (in France) was finally able to call Johan's DVI adapter in Finland...



These applications and demos run perfectly on the portable prototype.

With a reasonable CPU load (less than 40%) when you display both local & remote videos, this application shows once again the great potential of the EFIKA platform.



Last point, you can also turn the EFIKA into a video control server for home automation, lab experiments monitoring or even factory monitoring.

The EFIKA is able to encode on the fly video coming from a webcam (QVGA resolution) in MP4 and stream it over a network (TS encapsulation). Using MS Windows Media Player as a client (wmv & mms) is also possible. You will find the 2 appropriate VLC command lines (MP4 & WMV streaming) as reference in the v4l_vlc_stream file. Now just tweak them to fit your own needs.

I connected various machines running different OS to the EFIKA and the video link was working like a charm.

Stellae