Did you know that instead of installing special software to view your webcam video, you can simply use mplayer for the same purpose, and with a lot of fine control. e.g. try running the following command with your webcam attached to your computer.
mplayer -fps 15 tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:device=/dev/video0
And you can use mencoder to capture and encode video from your webcam:
mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=60:height=40:fps=60:device=/dev/video0 -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o test.avi
Have fun playing with the huge number of options available. You could even cat the test.avi file into a folder of your web server and have instant streaming video 
.
Wow, that’s so easy! Even my grandma can do that.
Yes, Linux is SO READY for the desktop!
@Carlo: Did I mention ANYWHERE in this post that:
1. It is meant to be done by grandmas?
2. to prove linux is ready for desktop?
3. or did I compare any 2 OS’s?
This post was meant only for ppl who already have mplayer installed and might be interested in not installing separate apps for doing common tasks.
(BTW on a separate note, are u telling me that copy pasting two lines and pressing enter is difficult for anyone. In that case, that user is definitely not capable of installing a new app, going through all the dialogue boxes full of asking geeky stuff to be yes’ed or no’ed, then finding where the shortcut is installed, running it and then finding which buttons to press to get the setup working)
great post, i really needed this.
i have a problem with my webcam and cheese apps. if i use mplayer, my webcam is working properly. but cheese won’t detect my webcam. although both of them use gstreamer. do you know how can this problem happen?
bazz: I’m not sure abt the problem but I vaguely remember having a similar problem with cheese detecting my webcam. It was probably using the wrong port or the wrong driver. I’ll try to see if I can recollect what the issue and its solution was and let you know.