I guess for security monitoring stuff, having a decent driver for a decent webcam would be nice. However, with the current trend to offload all peripheral processing onto the host CPU this can be a mixed blessing. For example, in '96 with a BW Quickcam my PC hardly broke sweat for videoconfrencing, fast forward 12 years and I can easily crash my dual-core AMD laptop by using its integrated webcam (CPU temp exceeds BIOS limits) under both linux and windows. Go figure.
For that matter, if you read a bit about v4l supported devices, it does seem to be the habitual jungle, different chipsets in same models etc. For any serious application, I'd go with dedicated ip cams, at least it doesn't put additional load on your server. mike
