On 14/11/2025 01:24, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
I wonder if cheese exists for RPi - that was always my default webcam tester/ Looks like it does
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:
[0000007f70028fb0] main decoder error: buffer deadlock prevented
The camera is one I bought from the Raspberry Pi store in Cambridge for
about œ25 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 œ32 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?
--
Cheers,
Daniel.
--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)