PlayStation 3 Eye web cam working on Ubuntu 8.10!

When I heard about the PS3 Eye cam and what it's capable of, I immediately ordered one for my DIY multi touch table project! It can deliver a staggering 120 frames per second, and it's relatively cheap to other cameras that can do this. I ordered mine for 40 euros. The high frame rate allows for a smaller delay when processing (multi) touch input, see an example here. This beasty doesn't directly work out of the box, you need to get drivers first. In this post I'll be explaining how to get it working on Ubuntu and the problems I faced while installing the driver. If you are looking for drivers for the PS3 Eye on Windows or Mac, see this thread or this thread, respectively.

First, get the gspca modified driver from kaswy. Extract the source to a directory, e.g. ~/src/gspca-ps3eyeMT. Then issue the following command in a terminal:

$ lsmod | grep gspca

If this command gives you any output, you have to unload the module(s) first. The drivers loaded at the time gave me problems because my computer was running for a long time without rebooting. The loaded drivers were older, when I tried to load the new gspca driver, the two conflicted. So to be on the safe side, it's best you not skip this step. This is an example possible output:


(Columns are: Module, Size, Used by)

You want to unload the driver that has a 0 in the third column, this unloads the drivers recursively. It's done like this according to the example:

$ sudo modprobe -r gspca_pac207

Verify the driver is unloaded by doing a

$ lsmod | grep gspca

Now, there should be no output.

If you haven't already, get the build tools for Ubuntu with the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

Next, we can start compiling, that's done like this:

$ cd ~/src/gspca-ps3eyeMT
$ make
$ sudo make install

The building process may contain some warnings, but it should finish without errors (some terminology: a warning isn't as bad as an error and warnings should not prevent a successful build).

Now we load the driver, the working modes for the web cam are:
00: 640x480@15
01: 640x480@30
02: 640x480@40
03: 640x480@50
04: 640x480@60
10: 320x240@30
11: 320x240@40
12: 320x240@50
13: 320x240@60
14: 320x240@75
15: 320x240@100 (added 15/02/09 V0.3)
16: 320x240@125 (added 15/02/09 V0.3)
Say we want to use the mode 640x480 pixels at 60 frames per second (mode 04), we issue the following command:

$ sudo modprobe gspca_ov534 videomode=04

This loads the driver and sets the desired video mode. Adjust the video mode to your own preference.

Next, we can plug in the PS3 Eye camera. We can verify that it has been plugged in by doing a

$ ls /dev/video*

before you plug in the camera, and then run it again after it's plugged in. It should display a(nother) video device, e.g. /dev/video0.

To preview the stream, we're going to use VLC, this is an excellent media player, if you don't have it installed, you can simply get it with:

$ sudo apt-get install vlc

Finally, we can open the web cam's video stream:

$ vlc v4l2:///dev/video0

(change /dev/video0 to the correct device if you have more than 1 video device plugged in.)
Voila, you should now have a video feed from the PS3 Eye on Ubuntu! Enjoy!

Update 18-feb-09: new driver V0.3 released by kaswy on 15-feb-09, new video modes added! See this post on how to update.

Side note #1: credit to kaswy for helping me install his drivers. This is the thread on nuigroup.com forums about the PS3 Eye drivers. There is another driver, but kaswy's is the most promising at the moment.

Side note #2: you may unload the drivers with the following command:

$ sudo modprobe -r gspca_ov534

And you may uninstall the drivers by running the following command from the source dir you installed from:

$ sudo make rminstall