Subj : Re: Webcam recommendations
To   : All
From : Daniel James
Date : Sat Nov 15 2025 11:43:50

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)

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