Creative Live! Cam Optia

Installed today Leopard 10.5 and updated to 10.5.1. I'm going to try this WebCam with Leopard, since mine had the issue we have been discussing here in this thread. Will post the results here.

Hi,

Found this thread after researching cameras to use with Photobooth on my G4 Powerbook (kids love it!) First I tried the Macally USB camera, and while it worked right out of the box, it didn't look very good. In fact the kids gave it a resounding thumbs down, loudly proclaiming that it looks cheap!

Well, we just can't stand for that, so I took back the Macally and bought one of the Creative Optia AF cameras. At first it didn't want to work, but I opened Quicktime Pro and enabled a "New Movie Recording" and it fired right up. After that, I opened Photo Booth (an early version I had downloaded from some link on this site), and I could get picture from the camera, but many of the special effects in Photobooth did not work. Some of the screen sizes seemed off as well.

Not really wanting to stand in another holiday return line, I decided to give it one more try with Leopard. So I upgraded the powerbook to Leopard 10.5.1, and everything seemed to work fine. Now, Leopard installed Photobooth 2.0, so that may have been the reason for the fix, but it does seem to work, and the picture quality of the Optia is tremendously better than the Macally. So for me, the Optia AF webcam does work with Leopard. It does not work with the macam driver however.

Bob

Hi, here PowerBook G4 12" and Leopard 10.5.2. I'm trying a Live! Cam Optia, no drivers installed.
It works well with iChat and Skype. Green picture with QuickTime Player and Photo booth. It works well again with hTV 0.2 and similar programs, based (I guess) on QuickTime. So it is a real mistery why there are problems with other programs...
Anyway, how can this cam be declared as Mac compatible when it simply does not work on a lot of Macs? I hope that Creative or Apple will fix the thing!

Ciao

Hi all, probably I got the solution! 🙂
Just install iGlasses ( http://www.ecamm.com/mac/iglasses/) and then magically QuickTime Player and Photo booth will work perfectly! Tested on iMac G4 17".
In my opinion these two applications suffer of a little bug, which takes no longer than 10 minutes to be fixed by Apple, so I still hope that it will be fixed. Anyway, now it works!

Ciao

Creative Live! Cam Optia AF works great with ICHAT and Photobooth but thing I have a problem with is the sound in Ichat seems to get static after every 5 min or so.. If i reset it in audio it goes away again for about 5 min and I have to do it all over again. Does any one else have this kind of problem?

i'm having this exact same audio issue. additionally, the auto focus seems to freeze. i have other audio gear set up on my mini, so i'm making sure that my system audio prefs are set to the 'usb camera' as well as setting my skype and ichat settings to 'usb' camera. macam from sourceforge doesn't recognize this camera. i'm hoping to find some mac software to control the camera...maybe limit it's sample rate or something. i'll post continued results.

i researched cameras extensively before buying this one. very annoying. i am reluctant to do a leopard or other system update.

Hi all,

I'm running my Powerbook (pre-intel chip) in OS X (10.4.9).
Just wondering if my Creative Live! Cam Optia will work with msn messenger (hotmail) or not as nothing seems to happen ?
Do i need to download anything ?
Any help appreciated as ever !

Hi

For MSN.

Try Mercury http://www.mercury.to/

Or aMSN http://amsn.sourceforge.net/

Both do video but no audio.

Tony

I have a Macbook and Macbook pro, bot with Leopard on them. Cam works in all software in both machines. However, on the machine I really need it for - a iMac G4 800 10.4.11 - it gives the same black screen/device in use problem. Anyone know anymore about this?

Same problem here (crackly audio after 5 minutes). Seems to get worse until conversation is impossible. Only solution is to reset the audio input. infuriatingly bad for a camera that cost this much.

p.s. leopard 10.5.2 is not the problem - i'm pretty sure it's the camera...