CrabApple of the Week: Apple’s non-support of USB webcams and cameras
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Configuration, Hardware, Review, Software, Utility Monday Jun 16, 2008There are some Mac models that come with a built-in camera - if you have one of those, you’re golden, at least until the camera malfunctions or you want higher resolution. But if you didn’t get a built-in camera, or for whatever reason you want to use any typical off-the-shelf webcam, you will find that Apple’s support for webcams sucks. I mean it REALLY sucks. You can take a perfectly good webcam that works great under Windows, and just try to use it under OS X. It will see that the camera is connected, but unless you are very lucky, it just ignores the camera’s output.
This is generally NOT a hardware incompatibility, although it can be, particularly if the webcam is an older model. However, there is a very nice third-party software program called macam, which is a driver for USB webcams on Mac OS X. The developer’s site explains that “macam consist of an application and a component. Run the macam application to verify whether your camera works with your Mac and your USB setup. The component is the actual driver that allows other applications to access the video-stream.” Macam currently supports just about half of the known cameras out there.
The problem is that that even with Macam installed, Apple’s bundled software won’t work with it. Got Photo Booth? Forget about using it with your unsupported webcam, although macam’s application (and some third party software) will let you snap single images of yourself or your kids. Want to have a video chat? iChat refuses to recognize a USB-connected webcam unless you purchase a third-party program (which we might have tried and reviewed, except that once we installed it and tried to use it one time, in an attempt that was unsuccessful due to an unrelated problem, on the second attempt it immediately thought that its seven day trial period was up and refused to run!). But you have to wonder, if a third-party program can make iChat work with a USB webcam, how hard would it be for Apple to enable this capability? It’s exactly this sort of thing that sometimes makes us wonder if we made the right choice by getting a Mac.
Of course, if you want to use Yahoo! Messenger, you can install their Mac client and use that to chat with your friends. Although we haven’t had the opportunity to fully test it yet, we do note that it at least recognizes our webcam (presumably using the macam driver) and displays a preview. That’s more than iChat does. As for AIM, for some inexplicable reason they distribute AIM 4.7 for Macintosh using a .bin format file, which must be expanded using Stuffit Expander. That put us off a bit, and since every review we’d read about it didn’t exactly give it a stellar recommendation, and since nowhere on the page for the Mac version did they say that it supports video chats, we decided to forgo attempting to install it for the moment - though we may revisit that decision later.
Oh, and before anyone comments that Adium has got a “mebeamIntegration” plugin that handles video - if you can get it to work, more power to you! We have it installed and when we try to access it (by right clicking on a contact, for example) it simply does not appear in the menu of choices. But then, we would add that the majority of comments we read about it (the plugin, not Adium itself) weren’t exactly glowing (though you could tell the hard cider drinkin’ boys in the bunch - their attitude was that if you got it for free you shouldn’t complain about it, even if it lays there like a giant turd on your hard drive and works poorly or not at all. After all, what did you expect for free, you ungrateful cheapskate?).
Come on, Apple - you put USB ports on your computers, and people expect that they can just plug in standard USB devices and they will just work. We will even put up with a little aggravation to get a device going, but when in your arrogance you decide that you simply won’t support an entire class of hardware, that’s simply going too far. We know that the hard cider drinkin’ boys will always think you can do no wrong, but those of us who have switched from Windows aren’t going to talk your products up to our friends and relatives if you can’t even support basic USB hardware properly. And yes, we do understand that you can’t support every older-than-dirt Webcam that was sold for use with Windows ‘98, but you should at least be able to support those webcams that are supported by the spca5xx/gspca Linux webcam driver project (which is given credit in the macam documentation). If the Linux folks can support these webcams, why can’t Apple? The answer is that there is no good reason why not, they just haven’t felt it’s a priority. Well, Apple, I suspect that many of your customers may feel differently about that.
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