[accrual]

This is pretty cool and impressive work! In a pleasant turn of events, "USB video device class" or UVC would have its initial release just 4 years later in 2003. Webcams implementing UVC, which most do since the early 2000s, communicate using a standard protocol which means almost any OS can access almost any webcam without any special drivers or software.

I have an 2012 Logitech webcam connected to an OpenBSD box. A cron job instructs ffmpeg to read from /dev/video0 every 10 minutes, which in turn writes a .jpg into a folder for creating a timelapse. Not bad for a random old webcam I had laying around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_video_device_class

[mrguyorama]

Even better, this device class also covers things like cheap digital "microscopes" and external USB video capture devices. It really simplifies working with those kind of tools.