Upside down skype video on Fedora 14 64bit

Yes that happens on my laptop:

Laptop: Asus K40AB
Web-cam: Chicony CNF7129

It seems Asus mounted the camera upside down in the laptop. The windows driver internally inverts the image and displays it.

Here's a simple trick that I learnt from the ubuntu forums.
If you run skype with:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype

It fixes the issue. But running it that way always isn't a fun.

There are two things to fix this situation:

1. The boring way: Create a shortcut on the desktop, with the above line as the executing application. This fixes the issue for only one user and cannot be invoked by the run command.

2. The fun way:
i. Log in to the super user

$ su

Enter the password
ii. Go to /usr/bin

# cd /usr/bin

iii. Rename skype to skype.main

# mv skype skype.main

iv. Create a new file skype with the below content:
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype.main

# echo "LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype.main" > skype

v. Make the new skype executable

# chmod 755 skype

And you are done. Now running skype will call the above script which has a fix thus the video is displayed correctly.

Still facing an issue? Post a comment.

Update: having issues with LD_PRELOAD, check updated article on my new blog here.