• Does Lifecam Studio Work With Windows 10
• Does Microsoft Lifecam Studio Work With Windows 10
• Microsoft Lifecam Cinema Too Bright
• Microsoft Lifecam Studio Too Brighton

This is a guide to setting up your webcam in Arch Linux.

How to fix camera brightness in Microsoft Teams I recently had a problem using my Microsoft LifeCam Cinema WebCam in Microsoft Teams. I would appear dark and have no way or adjusting it, sometimes it might randomly correct itself. I have a Microsoft Lifecam 3000 that I want to use with Microsoft Teams. The camera, however, is very dark in Teams - something that happens with no other video software. There seems to be no way to adjust the camera brightness in Teams (unlike in Zoom, for example). The old Lifecam Studio software would solve this, I think, but it does not run.

Most probably your webcam will work out of the box. Permissions to access video devices (e.g. /dev/video0) are handled by udev, there is no configuration necessary.

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Most recent webcams are UVC (USB Video Class) compliant and are supported by the generic uvcvideo kernel driver module. To check that your webcam is recognized, run dmesg just after you plug the webcam in. You should see something like this:

Some pre-UVC webcams are also supported via the gspca kernel driver module. See the gspca devices for a non-exhaustive list of supported devices under this framework.

Otherwise, if your webcam is not supported by the kernel's drivers, an external driver is necessary. The first step is to identify the name of the webcam, using for example lsusb. Then you can check webcam devices for information and resources about webcams. Once you find a driver compatible with the webcam, you have to add the corresponding kernel module in /etc/modules-load.d/webcam.conf so it will be loaded into the kernel during init stage bootstrapping.

Configuration

If you want to configure brightness, color and other webcam parameters (e.g. in the case when out-of-the-box colors are too bluish/reddish/greenish) you may use Qt V4L2 Test Bench. To run it, installv4l-utils and launch qv4l2, and it will present you a list of configurable settings. Changing these settings will affect all applications.

Command line

v4l-utils also installs an equivalent command line tool, v4l2-ctl. To list all video devices:

To list the configurable settings of a video device:

Persisting configuration changes

Configuration made via V4L2 does not persist after the webcam is disconnected and reconnected. It's possible to use v4l2-ctl with Udev rules in order to set some configuration each time a particular camera is connected.

For example, to set a default zoom setting on a particular Logitech webcam each time it is connected, add a udev rule like this:

To find udev attributes like the product name and serial, see Udev#List the attributes of a device. It also possible to set a static name for a video device).

Applications

See also List of applications/Multimedia#Webcam.

xawtv

This is a basic Video4Linux2 device viewer, and although it is intended for use with TV tuner cards, it works well with webcams. It will display what your webcam sees in a window.

Installxawtv and run it with:

In case of error see #xawtv with nvidia card.

VLC

VLC can also be used to view and record your webcam. In VLC's 'Media' menu, open the 'Capture Device...' dialog and enter the video and audio device files. Or from the command line, do:

This will make VLC mirror your webcam.

• To take stills, simply choose Snapshot in the Video menu.
• To record the stream, add a --sout argument to the command line, e.g.

(Obviously a bit overkill with regard to the bit rates but it is fine for testing purposes). Note that by default this will not display the video, in order to see what you are recording, you need to add the display as a destination to the argument (note that it will slow down the operation):

If VLC does not detect webcams, ensure that zvbi package is installed.

MPlayer

To use MPlayer to take snapshots from your webcam run this command from the terminal:

From here you have to press s to take the snapshot. The snapshot will be saved in the current folder as shotXXXX.png.If you want to record video continuous:

Press Ctrl+c to end the recording.

To play video with MPlayer using MJPEG as the pixelformat instead of the default, which in most cases is YUYV, you can run the following:

mpv

To use mpv to take snapshots from your webcam, run this command from the terminal:

From here you have to press s to take the snapshot. The snapshot will be saved in your current folder as mpv-shotNNNN.jpg.

Does Lifecam Studio Work With Windows 10

To use MJPEG as the pixelformat instead of the default, which in most cases is YUYV, you can run the following instead:

In some cases this can lead to drastic improvements in quality and performance (5FPS -> 30FPS for example).

To adjust webcam settings, including the resolution, see the mpv documentation.

FFmpeg

See FFmpeg#Recording webcam.

Troubleshooting

V4L1 support

Version 2.6.27 of the Linux kernel dropped support for the legacy Video4Linux (1) API. Pixel format decoding has been pushed to user space, since Video4Linux version 2 does not support kernel space decoding. The libv4l library provides userland applications with pixel decoding services and will be used by most programs. Other compatibility layers are also available.

If your device is created but your image looks strange (e.g. nearly completely green), you probably need this.

If the application has V4L2 support but no pixelformat support then use the following command:

If the application only supports the older version of V4L, use this command:

For 32-bit multilib applications, install the lib32-v4l-utils package and replace /usr/lib/libv4l/ by /usr/lib32/libv4l/ in the above commands.

xawtv with nvidia card

If you are using an nvidia graphic card, and get an error like

you should instead run it as $ xawtv -nodga

Microsoft Lifecam Studio/Cinema

Under certain configurations, the Microsoft lifecam studio/cinema may request too much usb bandwidth and fail see Uvcvideo FAQ. In this case, change the buffering by loading the uvcvideo driver with quirks=0x80. Add it to /etc/modprobe.d/uvcvideo.conf :

Skype

Does Microsoft Lifecam Studio Work With Windows 10

When testing the webcam, note the following:

• The echobot does not support videochat. Do not use it for testing your webcam.
• Skype might recognize different video/camera devices (/dev/video*). These will be listed as something like 'integrated camera...' in a dropdown menu in the camera settings. Try each camera and wait a few seconds, because it takes time to switch to a different camera.

Check bandwidth used by USB webcams

When running multiple webcams on a single USB bus, they may saturate the bandwidth of the USB bus and not work properly. You can diagnose this with the usbtop tool from the usbtop^AUR package.

Invert the video stream

If your video stream is inverted, you can make a new virtual video camera which inverts the inverted video. You need to installv4l-utils and also v4l2loopback-dkms. Create the virtual video camera:

Microsoft Lifecam Cinema Too Bright

Check the name of the newly created camera:

Then you can run ffmpeg to read from your actual webcam (here /dev/video0) and invert it and feed it to the virtual camera:

You can use the 'Dummy' camera in your applications instead of the 'Integrated' camera.

Bad image quality

If you experience images being too bright, too dark, too exposed or any other, you can install v4l2ucp^AUR to tweak your image output.

Microsoft Lifecam Studio Too Brighton