Poor man's workaround for Cheese zero byte problem on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)

Posted on by acme
cheese webcam application
cheese webcam application

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/.

2 thoughts on “Poor man's workaround for Cheese zero byte problem on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)”

  1. 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…

  2. @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!

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