Samsung used to sell web cameras for their smart TVs for use with living room video chatting with the likes of Skype. Samsung no longer supports Skype on their TVs (goodbye Skype!) or these devices but if you happen to have one laying around or buy one used for cheap, it’s now possible to use these Samsung TV cameras as a standard web camera under Linux.
Open-source developer Ondrej Zary announced the creation of a firmware loader to these Samsung TV cameras under Linux and could potentially be adapted for other operating systems too. These Samsung TV cameras rely on standard UVC video functionality and can work on the “uvcvideo” kernel driver, but the issue is there is no firmware available for these cameras embedded into the device. With the Samsung smart TV use-case, these web cameras relied upon the Samsung TV uploading the firmware to the camera’s RAM each time it is connected.
With this new independent, open-source “samsung-tvcam-fwloader” project it’s possible to load the firmware on supported Samsung TV cameras to allow them to function. The small program fetches the necessary firmware binaries from Samsung’s web servers and to then load the firmware on the system.
This samsung-tvcam-fwloader project should work with the likes of the VG-STC2000, VG-STC3000, VG-STC4000, and VG-STC5000 TV cameras. Once the firmware is properly loaded, the uvcvideo kernel driver should work just fine for enabling these Samsung TV cameras to have a second life on Linux.
Those with a Samsung TV camera or looking at them used online in the $20~30 price range can learn more via the Linux kernel mailing list and the project code itself is hosted on GitHub.
