[CentOS] Back to gspca - semi-[SOLVED]

Wed Jul 17 15:33:29 UTC 2013
Patrick Lists <centos-list at puzzled.xs4all.nl>

Hi Mark,

On 07/17/2013 05:11 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Hi, Patrick,
>
> Patrick Lists wrote:
>> On 07/17/2013 03:24 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>> Ok, following myself up (I've not seen any responses - is anyone
>>> listening?)...
>>
>> Yes, I've read every email you have sent on the subject. Unfortunatly I
>> have no clue.
>
> Thanks for listening, at least. Weeks of googling and screwing around gets
> *really* tiring and frustrating.

I can imagine.

>>> yesterday, right before I left, I got the camera working.
>>> However... it only works in 320x240 mode. In 640x480, it's still mostly
>>> green. Based on this, I've decided my previous analysis was wrong, and
>>> the real clue were the error messages about "not enough bandwidth". What I
>>> now think is that someone made a change to the USB driver for the oldest,
>>> 1.0 and 1.1 specs, and it only hits with certain onboard chips - nothing
>>> else can explain why it runs on similar but not identical hardware,
> running
>>> the same version of the o/s.
>>
>> I only have a gspca webcam in my laptop and it's broken so I can't
>> really be of much help. The only thing I recall is that it did not work
>
> Ah. Y'know, you can pick up the things really cheaply - I think we got a
> bunch of these little cameras a few years before I started here, and
> *then* they were something like $10 or $20 each.

This built-in gspca webcam is the only one I've had problems with. The 
more expensive Logitech ones always worked fine for me.

>> very well with Fedora. Usually I had to grab the upstream gspca driver,
>> mess with some defines to get the colors right, compile it and keep
>> fingers crossed when inserting the module and starting cheese. The
>> laptop's USB version is USB1 and it has a NM10/ICH7 chipset.
>
> Have you tried playing with the parms in your viewer? You might not need
> to recompile. And we're really trying *not* to build our own packages.

The laptop just got a fresh F19 install. I just wiggled the webcam after 
starting Cheese and to my astonishment the green led lit up and Cheese 
showed something. The pic was very bad, interlaced and it seems to copy 
everything 3 times horizontally while overlapping those images. I set it 
to 320x240 and no change. So also in F19 at least my gspca webcam is not 
working very well.

>> FWIW, maybe try every older kernel you can get your hands on and see
>> where the issue no longer occurs. Then get the kernel's src.rpm and try
>> to figure out which patch could possibly be the culprit.
>
> Can't do things like that, not without a show stopper: these are servers
> here at work, and they *must* stay up as much as possible.

Understand. The only reason I suggested it is that if you figure out 
which patch causes the issue that you could then file a BZ so that it 
might get fixed.

Regards,
Patrick