Webcam detected, recognised but no input in any application

[RodGer GR]

Hello dear ubuntuers.

I'm trying to make an external webcam work with Ubuntu 12.04.
Actually the camera belongs to my nephew who recently turned, to Ubuntu to see the light and, to me to solve all the problems. It used to work fine (although nothing else did), after installing the drivers, in windows.

I tried with many different applications
(gstreamer-properties, cheese, xawtv, skype 4)
and they all detect the camera in

/dev/video1

but also the input in all of them was just black / no input at all.

The brand name of the webcam (Turbo-X) doesn't matter, as the same device is branded under many different names (usually under the name of the shop that sells it).

lsusb

shows that the camera is recognized as:

Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0ac8:0323 Z-Star Microelectronics Corp. Luxya WC-1200 USB 2.0 Webcam

I found that my webcam uses the gspca driver which lately became a kernel module.

lsmod | grep gspca

gives me:

gspca_vc032x           31999  0 
gspca_main             27654  1 gspca_vc032x
videodev               86588  2 gspca_main,uvcvideo

After googling I followed some advice to try to use an older version of the "video for linux" driver (v4l1 instead of v4l2) and

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so cheese

gave me:

ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.

Is there anybody out there, kind enough, to provide an idea that can stop me from quiting on this?

Thanks in advance.

[alexmoon]

Did you ever work this out? Or develop a workaround?