Sunday, January 02, 2011

Trouble with v4l2 programs on Linux

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 on a Macbook Pro 1.1 (15") with a built-in iSight device. Had gotten the firmware extracted as recommended in this vein, and had installed Cheese, guvcview, luvcview, WebcamStudio (for fun with gifs on ChatRoulette) and gstreamer-properties (also failed at installing Coriander). I had guvcview and luvcview working until I downloaded v4l (when I already had v4l2 working). Well, something wrote over the files for ioctl.c in something because I kept getting the following error message:

"libv4l2: error getting capabilities: Inappropriate ioctl for device"

for guvcview, luvcview and v4l2ucp (Video4Linux Universal Control Panel). The problem was that it now started searching for my video device (iSight) under /dev/video0 when it's actually /dev/video2. This was remedied in guvcview and luvcview by adding "-d /dev/video2" to specify the device path. I haven't tried it with v4l2ucp yet, but I had success with luvcview and guvcview (a sweet program).

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