After installing things like imagemagick and mjpg_streamer on the Raspberry Pi, I exhumed a quartet of Logitech cameras from the heap to see how they worked. None bear any identification, apart from a tag on the cable, so here’s what I found out for later reference.
They’re all reasonably good for still pictures, if you don’t mind terrible initial exposures. The default program works OK:
fswebcam -d /dev/video0 -r 320x240 image.jpg
On the other hand, getting any streaming video requires searching through the parameter space, which wasn’t helped by the total lack of documentation. The Arch Linux wiki has a useful summary of camera & drivers, with pointers to additional lists-of-lists. The OctoPrint repo documents the mjpg-streamer plugin parameters.
So, we begin…
This camera, one of two identical cameras in the heap, has a clip that used to fit on the upper edge of a laptop display:
One has a tag:
To make the tag data more useful for search engine inquiries:
- M/N: V-UBG35
- P/N: 861228-0000
- PID: CE64105
From lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 008: ID 046d:08d8 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam for Notebook Deluxe
With Raspbian on the RPi, 640×480 video tears and stutters, leaving 320×240 as the least-worst alternative:
mjpg_streamer -i "/usr/local/lib/input_uvc.so -r 320x240" -o "/usr/local/lib/output_http.so -w /usr/local/www"
The cameras don’t support YUYV at all and the video quality is mediocre, at best, but they do have a manual focus ring that lets you snuggle the camera right up against the subject.
This ball camera:
Has a tag:
Which reads:
- M/N: V-UAX16
- P/N: 861306-0000
- PID: LZ715BQ
From lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 009: ID 046d:08ce Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Pro 5000
It requires YUYV at 320×240 (on the Pi) and nothing else works at all:
mjpg_streamer -i "/usr/local/lib/input_uvc.so -r 320x240 -y" -o "/usr/local/lib/output_http.so -w /usr/local/www"
It produces even worse video than the Notebook camera.
This HD 720p camera has C130 scrawled on the front in my handwriting:
And a tag:
Bearing this text:
- M/N: V-U0016
- P/N: 860-000261
- PID: LZ114SF
The scrawled C130 doesn’t match up with what lsusb reports:
Bus 001 Device 010: ID 046d:081d Logitech, Inc. HD Webcam C510
It produces very nice results in many resolutions, using YUYV mode, although I think its native resolution is 1280×720 and that works perfectly on the Pi:
mjpg_streamer -i "/usr/local/lib/input_uvc.so -r 1280x720 -y" -o "/usr/local/lib/output_http.so -w /usr/local/www"
Video over USB is mysterious…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Useful stuff. I’m familiar with the “dig through the box of random old cameræ to try to find one that will work for the current task” exercise. Note, PID: CD64105 should be PID: CE64105.
Good catch: thanks!
Perhaps newer cameras benefit from understanding the difference between “should work according to the spec” and “doesn’t fail no matter what happens”. That kind of decision may be motivated by call center workload…
I have been fighting on and off for several months trying to get a modern Logitech camera to stream video through OctoPrint. I had it working, then mjpg-streamer decided to start throwing errors after a system upgrade. And it is sad that in 2015, mjpeg is the method of choice for live browser streaming when my camera can do 1080p h264 encoding in hardware. I have nearly gotten it all working with gstreamer, but my energy waxes and wanes. Maybe it is on the rise…
Anyway, a useful tool for you: apt-get install v4l-utils, v4l2-ctl –list-formats-ext.
Aye!
I stumbled over the
v4lutilities while tracking down the same sort of gotchas, only to discover the cameras offer more resolutions than the RPi can actually handle. Frustrating it is, indeed.More on that in a bit, but reports from a Reliable Source say the RPi USB hardware isn’t up to, mmmm, contemporary standards.