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January 21st 2006 at 4:54 pm in Due to the lack of a microphone in my laptop I was searching for a information on getting the microphone in the PS2 EyeToy USB camera running on Linux. I knew that it had a built-in microphone, but didn’t know about any Linux support yet.
Audio support
I quickly came to discover that it’s supported by the USB Audio driver by default, so I was able to grab sound from the microphone by doing something like cat /dev/dsp1 > /dev/dsp.
I haven’t yet gotten it working in some GUI program, like Audacity or the KDE’s Sound Recorder, which, for some reason, either don’t have the option, or don’t allow me to specify the input-device the USB mic is on.
Modifying Audacity’s configuration file by hand doesn’t seem to have any effect either — it just only displays /dev/dsp as possible options. I quickly compiled and installed the latest stable version (1.2.4b), but all to no avail — it still refuses to show /dev/dsp1 as an option.
I found some posts from guys having the same problem, but no solution for this yet.
Video support
I knew that the ov51x kernel module kind-of supports the camera, allowing one to grab (still) JPEGs from it, but incidentally I found this ov51x-hack that loads JPEG decompression into the kernel. It is not really regarded safe, but it works like a charm.
Nah, I don’t think I’ll hack this piece of hardware to make it work in infra red. 
Dude,
What drivers r u using?
Imma using OmniCam drivers, and I can’t find anything bout using Eye Toy’s microphone………
Help me plz….
Oh, don’t bother
I’ve already figured this by myself
But, still, how do I use the mic in the apps?
Have you figured it out?
Hi Alex
If the driver has been installed and the camera connected, a new DSP device should appear (/dev/dsp1, because it will most likely be the 2nd audio device).
The /dev/dsp1 can be used as input in, for instance, VoIP applications. If you cannot specify this audio device as an audio source in your applications’ audio settings — I guess your application will not support it.