2

This is frustrating as this camera has worked on this exact same desktop with the exact same hardware, leading me to think that there's a serious driver issue at work.

The camera appears in lsusb when plugged in. Relevant output:

Bus 001 Device 075: ID 045e:0772 Microsoft Corp. LifeCam Studio

Various video and recording software will initially recognize the camera but spit out many lines of errors, including VLC, cheese, ffmpeg, mpv, and guvcview.

Before moving on, let me mention the things that I have tried already and which do not work:

Playing with the UVC_QUIRK_FIX_BANDWIDTH and UVC_QUIRK_RESTRICT_FRAME_RATE settings hasn't had any effect, following the instructions in the UVC FAQ.

The most important clue I've found so far is on the list of supported devices for this camera:

13 Despite being able to work with lower USB bandwidths, this device always requests the maximum possible bandwidth, even for the MJPEG format. Using one of those cameras in conjunction with another USB device (including the camera internal microphone) will likely fail. You can tell the uvcvideo driver to estimate the required bandwidth instead of trusting the camera by setting the FIX_BANDWIDTH quirk. This will only affect uncompressed formats, and even there there's no guarantee of success. See the FAQ for more information.

and...

15 Some versions of this camera have been reported to randomly time out or stall in response to valid UVC control requests, probably as a result of a race condition bug in the camera firmware. This can sometime lead to the camera failing to be recognized by the kernel. Little can be done to fix the problem.

Two questions:

  1. Given the above, should I forget about getting this camera to work? Or is there an alternative driver or hack-up I haven't found yet?

  2. Any ideas on why would this would go from working just fine as of 16.04 to "sorry, your camera's a brick and there's no solution" in 18.04? That's one of those roadblocks that really breaks you out of the Linux experience.

mutifarious
  • 101

1 Answers1

3

I also have a 045e:0772 Microsoft Corp. LifeCam Studio and it is VERY temperamental. I've tried them on a few computers, and they seem to be very sensitive to the USB ports they're plugged into (frequently failing in even Windows 10). It will, sometimes, trigger a USB reset of sorts, and everything connected to the same hub temporarily gets disconnected. Have you recently moved it from a USB2 to a USB3 port? I don't think it plays nice on newer ports.

I've found a firmware update for it, but it said it was already installed, and Microsoft's support pages are reeeeeeeal thin on the matter.

At the moment, my /etc/modprobe.d/uvcvideo.conf looks like this:

## fix bandwidth issue for lifecam studio/cinema
options uvcvideo quirks=0x80
## load loopback video devices for OBS
options v4l2loopback devices=4 video_nr="11,12,13,14" card_label="Loopback 1,Loopback 2,Loopback 3,Loopback 4"

... the latter two lines may not be relevant to you. I installed v4l2loopback kernel module to let me feed OBS back into things like Zoom.

To get anything even resembling a decent framerate in OBS, I have to select one of the emulated Video formats (in my case, YU12) and then it lets me up the framerate. Otherwise, it's limited to about 7.5fps :-/

Not much, but hope it helps.

ADFH
  • 31