Since the Latitude 1720’s webcam is only supported by a handful of applications (see the Linux UVC homepage) and none of them are for recording vidoes with sound, I decided to come up with a quick workaround. I wrote a tiny shell script called record.sh which just runs two commands at the same time, ffmpeg and sound-record so that they are synced up. It goes like this:
!#/bin/sh
ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 320×240 -i /dev/video0 -f avi out.avi &
sound-recorder -c 2 -b 16 -P recording.wav
This should outpit out.avi and recording.wav in the current directory, and then you can put the two together using your viedo editor of choice. I use Pitivi and walla, you have a video ready for youtube or whatnot. Now my laptop is, I think, fully functional.
There are a few last things I wanted to get to work with my laptop, mainly the webcam and microphone. I would go into detail on how I got them to work with Ubuntu but I found this great page : To install Ubuntu-7.04 on Dell Inspiron 1520 Which is for the 1520, but should work for 1720 as well. Good luck everyone.
My installation of Ubuntu went pretty smoothly besides the Nvidia drivers and one other problem: my TSSTcorp TS L632d ATA dvdr + rw drive was not recognized by linux. In fact it was straight invisible. Hwinfo showed nothing. Dmesg | grep cdrom showed even less. I started to think that I might have a serious bug to work out. However, the fix was simple.
I was doing some searches through google and linuxquestions.org when I cam across a post about the live cd not booting. It was for people who have SATA harddrives, which I thought had nothing to do with the dvd drive but the described effects were the same. The fix is to simply run “modprobe piix” in order to install the correct module. When I did, the audio cd popped up on my desktop immediately. Who would have thought? In order to make the fix permanent, I edited the “/etc/initramfs-tools/modules” file to include piix at the end. Then I ran “update-initramfs -u” to update the config, restarted and everything is working perfectly. I hope anyone who is having this same problem runs accross this post.
Cheers.
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