Comment 20 for bug 196811

Dear Sebastian,
you're definitely right. Indeed, I managed my quickcam express to work with cheese by enabling its v4l capabilities in hal.

By reading the bug reported at
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531835
after plugging the webcam, I issued the following commands

hal-set-property --udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_46d_870_noserial --key info.capabilities --strlist-pre video4linux
sudo hal-set-property --udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/usb_device_46d_870_noserial --key video4linux.device --string /dev/video0

That is, I manually added the v4l property to the device. Then, when you launch cheese, it recognizes and correctly uses the webcam.
Unfortunately, these properties are set on-the-fly, and they're lost when I detach the camera. I'm not an expert with hal, so I don't know
how to store this info permanently (i.e. I don't know anything about fdi files).

So, someone may want to help me in creating the appropriate patch for fdi files, so that it can be attached to the already reported hal bug at
freedesktop.org?

Thank you all for the support.