Thursday, September 11, 2008

Using a USB webcam with Mac OS X

It's kind of a pain to try to find a webcam to use with a Mac computer, or at least that was the problem I ran into. A lot of results showed up, but then either Mac wasn't listed in the specs, or else it just didn't say anything about supported operating systems. For any of you that run into this problem, hopefully this post helps. Macam is out there to help those of us with webcams made for Windows. It's a free, open-source program available at Sourceforge.net, and supports a fairly long list of webcams that are on the market. Macam is also listed in Apple's download pages.

The installation is really simple, like most Mac applications. It also includes support for using your webcam with other applications, such as Skype. I had to get a Mac user setup to use Skype to talk with one of our offices overseas, and ended up installing Macam and using a Logitech QuickCam Pro 5000. It worked like a charm, and supported the built-in microphone as well.

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