I have been occasionally using an old Zoom webcam (cpia-based) that produces about 3 frames/sec and video that is quite awful to look at. I was intrigued by the possibility of computer control of pan and tilt and bought the Logitech Quickcam Orbit today to use with the pwc driver.

I noticed the brightness was not autoadjusting. Sounds like running "camstream" might kick it into shape.

Probably the most disappointing thing is it looks like an application like gnomemeeting has to release the video device before I can use setpwc to control the pan/tilt. I suppose the real solution is to have gnomemeeting issue the appropriate ioctl's but that's a big job. Aren't you supposed to be able to watch the video as you adjust what the camera is looking at? (sigh)

(Update) I wrote a simple perl app to pan the camera... I also patched setpwc and camstream so it could be used on a camera that camstream had open. The camera sometimes forgets where it is and loses some of its range of motion. I added the flag -W to setpwc so it will pause after sending the move command before returning. It seems to help with the camera losing its place. The whole thing is a bit of a hack, but here it is:

• Perl/Tk panner application
• camstream patch to use my panner
• setpwc patches

I wish I had known about OrbitView which has pan/tilt control and live video in one app. I haven't tried it yet.

Another interesting option is the trackercam/trackerpod which is just a motorized harness that another camera is placed in. It has linux drivers too.

Dlink sells a couple of network cameras from about $330 - $450 that have pan/tilt and even wireless lan (model dcs5300w) at the high end.