Choppy webcam

Not sure if I should post this in "Hardware" instead,but here it goes anyway:

I have the GZ5 model and I can't help but think my Liteon webcam is broken. The video is very choppy in messenger. Well, it's choppy period. Even if I double click on "Acer crystal eye camera" (or something such) in windows explorer to open it up it's... well,choppy. My old logitech clicksmart 510 usb webcam that I bought (10?) years ago runs circles around this thing. I have flushed the original XP Home partition and installed my personal copy of XP Pro SP3 with all the updates and the latest drivers from the Acer site. I installed the "LiteOn WebCam Driver v5.8.33.1" for the webcam and every other driver I thought I needed (chipset,video,audio..everything looks fine) . But this webcam.. well.. to be honest... it sucks.

I'd like to know if any of you has the same problem? Is there some app or driver that is installed on the factory XP home installation that I missed? I wish I had a way to reinstall the provided restore dvds without using an external dvd-drive to check myself, but I'm still looking for a way to to that with a flashdrive.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

 

I have noticed the webcam gets choppy if there is not enough light in the room. If you are sitting in a dark room and you try to use the web cam, it will act like a web cam from 1990. Could that be the problem here, too?

 

i am getting similar performance. I'm loving the aspire one except for the webcam and the microphone. It pretty much makes this netbook useless for things like seesmic and tokbox. Any ideas on how to improve it? Anyone having OK performance on sites like these? I am seeing the same lackluster performance on Linux, XP, and MacOS.

On XP the sound works but is absolutely crap. The video is very very choppy regardless of room lighting. On Linux or Mac, the microphone doesn't even get picked up on flash sites like youtube or the above and the video is also very very choppy.

:cry:

 

I recently noticed that if had some daylight behind me (ie: a window) then the frame rate improves drastically. Which makes me thinks that there must be some way to fix this on the software side. That's no excuse for it's usual poor performance, but it's a start.

Can't talk about the other problems you have though because I dumped the bloated excuse for Windows Home that came with it and installed my own tweaked-to-death version of Xp Pro. All I can say is that I used messenger's video chat a couple of times already and nobody on the other side complained.

Video seems to work fine here, but then again I rarely use youtube or any of those video sites anyway. But the little I saw looked fine. Also, one of the first thing I do after a new OS install is to.. well.. install the XP video codec pack so that might help a bit. I just install this and forget about it forever.

http://www.xpcodecpack.com/

Good luck.

 

mine switches between black and white and colour when there are significant light changes in the room..even when i switch channels in the tv and the light bounces off me..