ZoneMinder Forums

CS 330, Intel Create and Share, USB webcam working with live and installed Mandriva based ZM CD 1.22.2. Installed Ubuntu 10.04 with ZM 1.24.2 and ZM console does not work with CS330, always get a red /dev/video0. Command from 10.04 "zmu -d /dev/video0 -V 1 -q -v" returns good info, see below, and the webcam works with "Cheese" in Ubuntu. How would you go about troubleshooting this issue? TIA

zmu -d /dev/video0 -V 1 -q -v
Video Device: /dev/video0
Video Capabilities
Name: USB Camera (0733:0401)
Type: 1
Can capture
Video Channels: 1
Audio Channels: 0
Maximum Width: 640
Maximum Height: 480
Minimum Width: 48
Minimum Height: 32
Window Attributes
X Offset: 0
Y Offset: 0
Width: 640
Height: 480
Picture Attributes
Palette: 0 - Unknown
Colour Depth: 8
Brightness: 0
Hue: 0
Colour :20805
Contrast: 64715
Whiteness: 0
Channel 0 Attributes
Name: spca501
Channel: 0
Flags: 0
Type: 2 - Camera
Format: 0 - PAL

If your using shared memory check that setting, try video for Linux 1, try different palettes. Better yet look though system, ZM, Apache, and any other logs you can find for indications. Might need to bump up debug level in ZM.

Looking at syslog, I occassionally saw a permission denied when zmc was trying to connect to /dev/video0, more often I would see an "invalid argument" when zmc was trying to connect. Did a clean reinstall from a clonezilla image and reinstalled zm via the Ubuntu 9.10 instructions and now I get a distorted image with v4l v2, v1 doesn't return anything. Tried most combinations of NTSC and Pal with reduced frame rates and resolutions, but only get a distorted image. If I stop zm and start up "cheese" the image looks good, so it looks like zm just cannot handle the output of the spca501 driver.

According to http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html the driver works but not completely. Would be nice to know how "cheese" successfully captures the cs330 images. Have another webcam, based on konicawc driver. Its being rolled into gspca but not until kernel 2.6.33 so guess I'm stuck for now unless I can figure out how "cheese" works. Thanks for the feedback.