TechnowledgeBase

My webcam, a Creative LIVE! Notebook Pro, didn’t want to work with my MacMini. They wouldn’t talk. They had “issues” that needed to be resolved. True… the cam was never originally INTENDED to work with a Mac, but when the wife torched, destroyed, couldn’t use the laptop she had any more, I dragged the Mac Mini out of semi-retirement and plugged it in for her. My experiences getting her files and applications transferred from failing PC to Mac will probably be the subject of other blog postings, but I figured that the webcam would at least be easy. Find some MAC drivers, install them, and plug it in, right?

WRONG! If Creative had Mac OS drivers on their website, they had ‘em hid pretty good. I’m not saying that there AREN’T any, but at this point I had to proceed as if there weren’t.

The Problem:
My webcam won’t work with Mac OS X. There are no drivers to download from the vendor, and if I simply pug the webcam in, the light on the cam turns on but the operating system (and all the programs on it) tells me that there’s no cam attached. Damn.


The Solution:

MACAM
This is an open-source (i.e. FREE!) driver that supports a lot of different webcams on the Mac OS X platform. The exact list of supported hardware is… impressive. But all I cared about was my lowly Creative Live Notebook Pro. It (or several things close to it) was listed on their page, so I downloaded it and gave it a try.

What I downloaded was a zip file that contained two file. A macam application and a macam.component file. Rather than recount my embarrassing tale of trying to figure out what file was supposed to go where, I’ll just tell you. The component file goes in your

System/Library/Quicktime/

directory. Go to “Finder” and click on your hard drive. You’ll see the “System” folder in there. The other file in the zip is just an application that you can use to test your installation. I dropped that in my applications directory. To test it out, I installed Yahoo Messenger, logged in, and turned on the cam. It connected and worked with no problem whatsoever.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Mac, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.