Back in the days where I used Windows having video and audio conversations with Skype was really easy. Just plug in all the devices and configure the volume of the microphone and you are done.

Today I tried the same with my Ubuntu 10.04 installation and I encountered a few problems. This is how I got my webcam working with Skype:

  • Check if your web cam is working in general. The program Cheese is quite suitable for this task.
  • Test if Skype works with you cam. Open the options dialogue, go to “Video” and click test. If you see yourself, everything is fine :-)
  • Otherwise create a shell script with the following content:
    1. #!/bin/bash
    2. LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so  /usr/bin/skype

    This script forces Skype to use the Video4Linux drivers instead of the native ones.

  • If you got this error like this:

    X Error, request 132, minor 18, error code 8 BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)

    Modify you script this way:

    1. #!/bin/bash
    2. export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 skype
    3. LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so  /usr/bin/skype
  • Whenever you start Skype and want to use your web cam use this script to start Skype.

P.S.: If you are on a 64bit system you probably need to do this:

  1. #!/bin/bash
  2. LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libv4l/v4l1compat.so  /usr/bin/skype