I second the UVC driver recommendation, or anything with drivers upstream (that is, in the Linux kernel itself). If this is for your day job spending £250 is we

I second the UVC driver recommendation, or anything with drivers upstream (that is, in the Linux kernel itself). If this is for your day job spending £250 is well worth it for one of the better quality brands, otherwise you'll be spending far more than that debugging reliability issues. Depending on your project, it might be worthwhile using GStreamer instead of tying yourself to a specific driver like libuvc. There's a lot you can do with just GStreamer's command-line tools -- for some examples see the first 5 minutes of my talk[1] -- and if you need more you can drop down into C or Python, though admittedly the learning curve is fairly high. [1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdn2LxxM7wA&list=SPSIUOFhnxEiCODb8XQB-RUQ0RGNZ2yW7d http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdn2LxxM7wA&list=SPSIUOFhnxEi...