A week ago, I firstly plugged an old webcam that came with Microsoft Keyboard/Mouse bundle. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it to work. I intended to use it to stream this cat‘s snoring via Ustream.tv. Flash plugin can detect this webcam but couldn’t get any image, nor Cheese, camE, or Xawtv could.

My webcam (Vender: IC Media Corp.) and driver:


### v4l2 device info [/dev/video0] ###
general info
    VIDIOC_QUERYCAP
        driver                  : "tv8532"
        card                    : "USB Camera (0923:010f)"
        bus_info                : "0000:00:1d.1"
        version                 : 2.2.0
        capabilities            : 0x5000001 [VIDEO_CAPTURE,READWRITE,STREAMING]

Here is the errors I got from Cheese:


$ cheese
libv4l2: error dequeuing buf: Input/output error

The temporary resolution is easy to do, please follow the steps by libv4l‘s author. It’s for Fedora, I believe you can find the way (to install kernel source) on your distribution, or just wait for updated kernel.

After rebooted, I have:


[snip]
        version                 : 2.4.0
        capabilities            : 0x5000001 [VIDEO_CAPTURE,READWRITE,STREAMING]

Now, it’s working but still not for Flash 64Bit (10.0.d21), Flash would display but distorted image. You can test with this1. The resolution for Flash is to preload library, which is also mentioned on the same blog. Therefore, I have to run Firefox in this way:


LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libv4l/v4l1compat.so firefox

Note that is for x86_64, remove 64 for 32Bit.

Now problem resolved, but where is the cat hiding?