Webcam recommendations

I wonder if cheese exists for RPi - that was always my default webcam tester/ Looks like it does

Try that first...if that works the webcam/USB is OK

I've been using Philips SPC 1000NC Webcam (USB 0471:0332) for >10y now. It is a UVC device. Take care that whatever you buy is UVC. This will guarantee 99,99999% to work properly.

You will probably also have to take care of permissions. I am not sure but I have myself in the 44(video),46(plugdev) groups. Teams works also fine.

BR

My Logitech C270 was fine when directly attached to a Pi 5B, but not so good via a USB hub. I don’t know which component is at fault there, but if you’re using the Pi’s sockets then this it doesn’t matter. You can still get one of these devices for about £20 on Amazon.

My C920 was fine both ways.

I used the Debian build of Cheese[1] to test both.

The answer is just an “apt-cache search” away ...

Thanks all, for your suggestions. Given me some food for thought...

Yes, cheese is just an "apt install" away.

I had a spare moment and a spare webcam and a Pi 3b that wasn't doing anything so I plugged the webcam into the Pi and installed cheese ...

... the camera was recognized straight away, but I did not get a picture. cheese displayed "There was an error playing video from the webcam".

So I tried the camera on my big AMD64 box (which already has the same model of webcam installed) and cheese recognized both and let me switch between them and display an image from either.

So I went back to the Pi. I tried changing resolutions with no joy. I tried changing source to one of the (non-existent) Pi camera sources and back. No joy.

I tried running cheese in a terminal and got:

----- $ cheese

(cheese:1798): Cogl-WARNING **: 11:05:55.858: driver/gl/gl/cogl-texture-driver-gl.c:453: GL error (1281): Invalid value

(cheese:1798): Cogl-WARNING **: 11:05:55.858: driver/gl/gl/cogl-texture-driver-gl.c:457: GL error (1281): Invalid value

(org.gnome.Cheese:1798): cheese-CRITICAL **: 11:05:56.658: GValue type gint x GstValueList, cannot be handled for resolution

(org.gnome.Cheese:1798): cheese-CRITICAL **: 11:05:56.659: GValue type gint x GstValueList, cannot be handled for resolution

(org.gnome.Cheese:1798): cheese-WARNING **: 11:05:58.128: Internal data stream error.: ../libs/gst/base/gstbasesrc.c(3187): gst_base_src_loop (): /GstCameraBin:camerabin/GstWrapperCameraBinSrc:camera_source/GstBin:bin28/GstV4l2Src:v4l2src1: streaming stopped, reason not-negotiated (-4)

-----

None of which meant anything much to me.

I then tried vlc (again, in the terminal). Opened a capture device, (mode Video camera, device name /dev/video0) and got a VERY slow video of myself. I should think the frame rate was about 4fps ... but the camera was definitely working.

vlc produced one message in the terminal window that looks interesting:

The camera is one I bought from the Raspberry Pi store in Cambridge for about £25 three or four years ago. It is an "A4TECH PK-910H 1080P Full-HD WebCam". The one on my AMD64 box came from Pi Hut (during Covid, when you couldn't get webcams from the usual suspects even for silly money), they have it online for £32 today.

Why it doesn't work with cheese on the Pi I can't say, though maybe the buffer deadlock message from vlc contains a clue that cheese isn't doing something necessary that vlc is?

... On a Pi500+ the webcam works perfectly with cheese (and the same "CRITICAL" errors appear in the terminal window) but while vlc shows an image it is an inverse video image in magenta and green. The same "buffer deadlock" message is shown in the terminal window.

I'm baffled.

Just to update, installed Cheese and works perfectly, also the camera now works in Teams - yay!

I suspect installing Cheese may have installed some dependencies that Teams needed but didn't complain about.

Still gives me inverted colours in VLC, but not looking to use that anyway.

Ah...

Wouldn't be the first time

That may be a VLC config issue.