Monday, February 1, 2010

Skype video in Fedora.

I found that video does not work in my Skype (Beta) 2.1.0.81 under Fedora 12.

$ sudo dmesg | grep skype
returned
process `skype' is using obsolete setsockopt SO_BSDCOMPAT

$ sudo cat /var/log/messages | grep skype
returned
Jan 31 23:15:01 localhost kernel: process `skype' is using obsolete setsockopt SO_BSDCOMPAT

After a quick online research I found that you can link Skype with /usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so to get the video work for you.

Make sure you have libv4l (a collection of video4linux support libraries) installed:
$ sudo yum install libv4l

Then you can write a script with the following content:
#!/bin/bash
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

Let's call it skype-video.sh and make it executable:
$ cd ~/.Skype
$ vi skype-video.sh
Now add the content provided above, save the file and exit (:wq).
Make the file executable:
$ chmod 755 skype-video.sh

Now you can lunch your "new" Skype and the video should work. It works for me.
$ ~/.Skype/skype-video.sh &

Important: Make sure that there is no another Skype instance running at the same time.

Reference: 
Skype for Linux 
Fedora Project - Features/Better Webcam Support
Dynamic Linker

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the solution I did what you are telling, but still can't see my webcam. Also don't Know where is the directory where you save the file my current directory is root. Thank you for reading.
    angel.perez@ciencias.unam.mx

    ReplyDelete