Webcam and Cheese not working

[DinghyMan]

Sirs,
I have a webcam on Ubuntu 11.10 which was working well in Cheese, Skype and Motion.

I rebooted the PC, and now the webcam doesn't work. Cheese hangs with a blank screen and no menus or elements on the screen. VLC doesn't display anything.

With motion, there is no output and no webcam output.

With lsusb I get:
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0c45:60c0 Microdia PC Camera with Mic (SN9C105)

What is wrong? How do I get it working again?

Many thanks for your help.

[Rockstarever]

open a terminal and type in

gstreamer-properties 

this will pop up some msg and open up a window named "Multimedia systems selector" go to video tab and check the default input plugin
set it to your camera and you are done. now check if its working by pressing the test button and opening the cheese. good luck.

[mörgæs]

Is there a particular reason for running 11.10?

The webcam drivers have improved a lot the later releases.

[DinghyMan]

Dear Rockstarever and morgaes,

Thank you for your help.

Firstly, I am using 11.10 as I wanted to be using a stable system, and that works - and has been working, and I don't like the more recent releases. I had everything I needed working in 11.10, so I don't understand why it has stopped working!


Also I tried the gstreamer-properties and got:-

(gstreamer-properties:14396): Gtk-WARNING **: Unknown property: GtkDialog.has-separator

(gstreamer-properties:14396): Gtk-WARNING **: Unknown property: GtkDialog.has-separator
gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin 'artsdsink'
gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin 'esdsink'
gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin 'sunaudiosink'
gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin 'glimagesink'
gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin 'sdlvideosink'
gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin 'v4lmjpegsrc'
gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin 'qcamsrc'
gstreamer-properties-Message: Skipping unavailable plugin 'v4lsrc'


which explains why I get a blank Cheese screen, but I don't know why, or the solution !

Thank you for your help.

[mörgæs]

If you somehow manage to get it working, you will have only four months of support in 11.10.

You will be better off with a fresh install of 12.10 right away.

[dannyboy79]

if you like stable releases I would suggest installing 12.04, it's an LTS release, meaning a long support life. You could test out your webcam using a 12.04 live cd to see if it works out of the box. have you checked out this page?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam

[DinghyMan]

Dear Dannyboy79 and morgaes,

Thank you for your help. The link https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Webcam gave me a page 500 error.

As for 12.04 or 12.10 - I take the point that at some point I will have to upgrade, but I had a working system, and I know it takes so much effort to upgrade (or has in the past), and the webcam was working - and had been working really well for many months. If possible I would like to get it working, then I can upgrade knowing it's working rather than having a partially working system, and have an additional set of unknowns! Is that possible, or should I upgrade and risk lots of stuff not working?!! (That does make me nervous leading up to the holidays!)

Many thanks for your help!

[mörgæs]

You don't have to decide now. Better to do a live boot of 12.10 and see how it works.

[dannyboy79]

Sirs,
I have a webcam on Ubuntu 11.10 which was working well in Cheese, Skype and Motion.

I rebooted the PC, and now the webcam doesn't work. Cheese hangs with a blank screen and no menus or elements on the screen. VLC doesn't display anything.

With motion, there is no output and no webcam output.

With lsusb I get:
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0c45:60c0 Microdia PC Camera with Mic (SN9C105)

What is wrong? How do I get it working again?

Many thanks for your help.

have you verified that you have a /dev/video0 device? also, you said this all used to work, have you tried booting into an older kernel? it's possible a kernel upgrade has caused this.

i don't know why you get error 500 with that link, works fine for me. It's the official ubuntu help page for webcams. Try to google "ubuntu webcam help", for me it's the first returned search result, click that link
I would run 12.04 if it were me.

[DinghyMan]

Dear dannyboy 79,

Thank you for your help. The webcam was working a few days ago, and I do not recall installing any updates in that time (hence my reluctance to change another set of variables).

I also have a TV card and a satellite card so in the past the webcam has been /dev/video2 - so nothing has changed as far as I am aware.

I did find the following in dmesg:-
INFO: task motion:22856 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
[139800.352072] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
[139800.352075] motion D 00003a51 0 22856 1 0x00000000
[139800.352079] f4151c7c 00000086 00000000 00003a51 00000000 dc3019a0 c1768060 c1874ec0
[139800.352083] c1874ec0 862ff1b5 00007efc f77c6ec0 dc3019a0 e9fb19a0 f77c6ec0 00000000
[139800.352087] 00000000 c153e520 f77c6ec0 c153e520 f4151c58 c1032b82 e9fb19a0 f77c6ec0
[139800.352091] Call Trace:
[139800.352098] [<c1032b82>] ? check_preempt_curr+0x72/0x90
[139800.352101] [<c1032bc8>] ? ttwu_do_wakeup+0x28/0x130
[139800.352105] [<c1530f35>] schedule+0x35/0x50
[139800.352107] [<c1531ad6>] __mutex_lock_slowpath+0xc6/0x120
[139800.352109] [<c1531784>] mutex_lock+0x24/0x40
[139800.352126] [<f810b64f>] videobuf_streamoff+0x4f/0x70 [videobuf_core]
[139800.352133] [<f9f0df36>] saa7134_streamoff+0x36/0x70 [saa7134]
[139800.352138] [<f9f0df00>] ? video_release+0x270/0x270 [saa7134]
[139800.352144] [<f82ba276>] __video_do_ioctl+0x1d56/0x6460 [videodev]
[139800.352147] [<c102e997>] ? __wake_up_common+0x47/0x70
[139800.352150] [<c103012c>] ? __wake_up_sync_key+0x4c/0x60
[139800.352155] [<c1253e35>] ? apparmor_socket_sendmsg+0x15/0x20
[139800.352159] [<c142b45c>] ? sock_sendmsg+0xec/0x110
[139800.352162] [<c146f32d>] ? ip_finish_output+0x12d/0x300
[139800.352165] [<c146f5d0>] ? ip_local_out+0x20/0x30
[139800.352167] [<c153294d>] ? _raw_spin_lock+0xd/0x10
[139800.352170] [<c1117b73>] ? add_partial+0x43/0x70
[139800.352173] [<c128b53f>] ? __copy_from_user_ll+0x1f/0x40
[139800.352178] [<f82b82f4>] video_usercopy+0x234/0x2d0 [videodev]
[139800.352183] [<f82b8520>] ? v4l2_norm_to_name+0x50/0x50 [videodev]
[139800.352186] [<c142ac98>] ? sock_destroy_inode+0x28/0x30
[139800.352188] [<c111988a>] ? kmem_cache_free+0xea/0x100
[139800.352191] [<c113c419>] ? __d_free+0x39/0x60
[139800.352193] [<c11414da>] ? iput_final+0xaa/0x150
[139800.352195] [<c113c419>] ? __d_free+0x39/0x60
[139800.352197] [<c113c419>] ? __d_free+0x39/0x60
[139800.352200] [<c115ddd8>] ? fsnotify+0x198/0x250
[139800.352204] [<c12258f4>] ? security_file_permission+0x24/0xb0
[139800.352206] [<c114493d>] ? vfsmount_lock_global_unlock_online+0x4d/0x60
[139800.352212] [<f82b83a7>] video_ioctl2+0x17/0x20 [videodev]
[139800.352216] [<f82b8520>] ? v4l2_norm_to_name+0x50/0x50 [videodev]
[139800.352221] [<f82b73aa>] v4l2_ioctl+0x10a/0x110 [videodev]
[139800.352225] [<f82b72a0>] ? v4l2_mmap+0xa0/0xa0 [videodev]
[139800.352228] [<c113a029>] do_vfs_ioctl+0x79/0x2d0
[139800.352230] [<c13356d0>] ? read_null+0x10/0x10
[139800.352233] [<c113a2ef>] sys_ioctl+0x6f/0x80
[139800.352235] [<c1532d64>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb

Sadly, it has meant nothing to me, and I couldn't see a reference to the webcam.

If I have no option, I will try 12.04 or 12.10 but as I mentioned, to me it seems if it was working before, I should be able to get it working - and then upgrade.

Many thanks for all your help, it's really appreciated.