
I’m checking cyclic if the zero byte problem with the webcam application cheese is gone meanwhile.
So happened today, and no – it’s not. Since I really needed a stream badly today, I’ve looked again for a fix or workaround. But looking on the Internet for this bug reveals that this bug used to happen more often than one time. It’s sad, because I like this little nifty application.
And found only poor man’s workaround. Well, better then nothing.
the lsusb
command gives me this results for my two different usb-webcams:
Sansun SN-508
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0ac8:301b Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. ZC0301 WebCam
Ciron QB-367
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0ac8:301b Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. ZC0303 WebCam
And if you want the stream to be recorded, you can use mencoder:
mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0:width=640:height=480 -ovc lavc -nosound -o webcam-filename.avi
UPDATE: found a nice blog entry, where it’s described more detailed: http://brightedges.blogspot.com/2008/06/webcam-and-mplayer.html
UPDATE: 2008-12-12: I’ve tried cheese on a Fedora8 system today, and guess what, it’s not capturing video streams either. My impression is this cheese doesn’t work at all, nowhere. The Fedora version is version 2.24.2, and I’ve compiled the Version 2.24.2 on Ubuntu 8.10 from source, with the same effect. The video turns black the moment when the record button is being pressed, and no video is recorded at all, just a zero-byte sized file is created in ~/Video/Webcam/
.
to record both video and audio from my acer crystaleye webcam i use ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -f oss -i /dev/dsp -f video4linux2 -s 640×320 -i /dev/video0 out.mpg
NOTHING else i tried worked, not mencoder, not cvlc / vlc…
@nick humphrey
This Cheese bug it’s actually a joke.
I’m not sure Cheese is really responsible for it, but maybe v4l or something. But nevertheless, what I see is a non-working Cheese, no matter what makes it not work.
And it’s still broken on my Ubuntu 9.04, and even the experimental 2.26 version doesn’t work.
That’s why I appreciate your comment very much. The more workarounds we’ve got, the better.
Thanks!