[kwlug-disc] Cheese/Webcam software & MacBook drivers (filing bug report)

[Charles M]

Hi all,

Computer Recycling was installing Cheese in our Xubuntu installations,
but I recently removed it because I found Cheese doesn't work with a
lot of webcams that are supported by Guvcview and Zoom.

The proverbial "straw in the camel's back" was when I installed the
Facetime-HD driver on Xubuntu for some MacBook Air 2015-2017 laptops
and found that Cheese took a snapshot and then just hung, not letting
me switch between photo/video. The hamburger menu was accessible, but
nothing else.

When I loaded up guvcview it loaded just fine using the same
Facetime-HD driver. So I decided to give Zoom a try, it also worked on
the same MacBook Air (2017).

I thought perhaps it was the .deb package (41.1), so I decided to
compile cheese from the gitlab repository. (That was fun given my
limited knowledge, but I managed to muddle through and get all the
libraries correct, finally compiling a binary for the latest Cheese).
Same problem. For giggles, I tried the snap, and it too had the same
issue.

I mentioned webcamoid earlier, because it also locks up, and it shares
some similar features as Cheese. I'm thinking the might share some of
the same code that guvcview and zoom don't.

Should I be filing a bug report against the Facetime-HD driver? This
would make logical sense, but the issue doesn't seem to be a general
webcam issue (webcamtests.com works just fine). I started by filing a
bug report with Cheese, but since it's also an issue with webcamoid...

Going back to Xubuntu 20.04 the issue did not exist. It's only a
recent version of Cheese where this issue manifests itself. So ...

Still I removed Cheese from our installed software ultimately not
because of the Macs, but because when I tested it with several other
cameras it refused to work where guvcview simply worked...

Charles
-- 
Charles
Mastodon: @chaslinux at techhub.social