GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 560983
Video recording does not work, Effects do not work
Last modified: 2008-11-18 08:05:55 UTC
Please describe the problem: I am trying to use Cheese video recording and it does not work. Video recording is broken. I can however use Skype to video chat and also take pictures. This means that video recording in Cheese is broken. Effects do not work on Cheese. If you click on the Effects button, the application crashes. Steps to reproduce: 1. Start cheese. The window shows the video, indicating the the device and the driver are working fine. Click on the Video button on Cheese. 2. Press spacebar - the display is now black and no longer shows anything. 3. Press Stop Video recording and the application has crashed now. GNOME asks if the application should be forced to quit and that is the only option. 1. Start Cheese. Windows shows the video indicating that the device and driver are working fine. 2. Press on the Effects button - the application crashes here. Nothing can be done except force quitting the application. Actual results: No video output is produced. Video AVI file is blank. Effects should be on a side-pane and one should be able to choose from the effects while seeing the video output produced. Expected results: Video recording: 2. The display should show the video being captured, preferably with the quality of the video being reflected in the capture. 3. The program should not crash upon pressing "Stop video recording" 4. A complete and well-encounded AVI output file should be placed in the Videos/Webcam directory. Effects: 2. Effects should be on a side-pane and one should be able to choose from the effects while seeing the video output produced. Does this happen every time? Yes. Other information: I can attach logs, reports and as many things as you ask me for. Please write to me at balaji.ramasubramanian@gmail.com for more information. This version of the software is in Intrepid Ibex and is being used by many people worldwide. This bug affects every single user of your software. There is NO EXCEPTION to this at all. EVERY SINGLE user is facing this bug. I have verified it with a group of 250 Ubuntu user colleages in my university and none of them can get this to work.
could you please attach the output of cheese -v? to your comment: it does not affect every single user, as it is working on several computers we tested it. please do not go over the top with your descriptions about cheese not working at all, as you could hurt somebody personally. if it is crashing on every pc you had the possibility to test, it would be great, whats so special about these computers.
Thanks for your prompt response. Sorry if that does not sound good and would be really very sorry if it hurt someone. It wasn't my intention at all - but please consider the frustration several of us are facing today. We tested this on Intel (Centrino, P4 and P3) AMD64 (Athalon, Turion and of late Barcelona servers in my University). These machines were HP make, laptops. Further, we tried Dell, Acer and Toshiba with similar configurations. We also tried separate desktops with Logitech QuickCam. One thing to be noted is that all these machines were running Ubuntu Linux (Most of them had 8.10 installed, though I remember that even 8.04 did not have this feature working on Cheese.). It is quite possible that it is a problem caused by something in Ubuntu or something in gstreamer. My hunch would be gstreamer. But as far as I see it, I can video chat with family and friends over Skype, but not use Cheese to record videos. Here is the output of cheese -v ** Message: Error: Stream contains no data. gsttypefindelement.c(785): gst_type_find_element_activate (): /GstPlayBin:play/GstDecodeBin:decodebin0/GstTypeFindElement:typefind: Can't typefind empty stream ** (cheese:6570): WARNING **: could not generate thumbnail for /home/blackmaster/Videos/Webcam/2008-11-15-190724.ogv (video/ogg) Killed The above output which I have noticed is the reason for me to suspect gstreamer. So I also tried gstreater-properties. What I notice is that, when I test the video capture device, the capture works the first time I test it. After that if I test it no capture works at all. I have to restart the machine for video capture to work after that. Even the video display that Cheese used to get so well right on startup was not showing. Thanks a lot for your help. And once again, I'm sorry if the bug file sounded harsh. If there is a way to edit it, I'd take it down and instead write down the different kinds of machines that we tested it on and also the observation that it failed in a particular OS version. -Balaji
Created attachment 122760 [details] Output of cheese --gst-plugin-spew --g-fatal-warnings --gst-debug-level=3 md5sum a689f368561c38687ffa29e3419eb02c
I wanted to give you the output of cheese --gst-plugin-spew --g-fatal-warnings --gst-debug-level=5 but that is a 3 MB file and would not upload. Is there anything else I can provide you?
Created attachment 122761 [details] A list of the gstreamer packages installed on my machine. Output of dpkg -l | grep gstream > dpkg-gst.list
Your cheese -v output is missing some important information. We need the very first lines printed when you start cheese. Anyway what webcam are you using? which webcam driver? If you still have access to all those computers where cheese is broken I would be very interested about a cheese -v output, the webcam name and the driver used from them too (only the ones using intrepid, video recording was really broken with hardy). By the way, cheese is only able to create ogg videos don't expect it to create avis in the Video/Webcam directory.
I thought I gave the whole output. This is what I can see on the terminal: $ cheese -v ** Message: Error: Stream contains no data. gsttypefindelement.c(785): gst_type_find_element_activate (): /GstPlayBin:play/GstDecodeBin:decodebin0/GstTypeFindElement:typefind: Can't typefind empty stream ** (cheese:13657): WARNING **: could not generate thumbnail for /home/blackmaster/Videos/Webcam/2008-11-15-200507.ogv (video/ogg) ** (cheese:13657): CRITICAL **: gst_x_overlay_set_xwindow_id: assertion `overlay != NULL' failed ** Message: Error: Stream contains no data. gsttypefindelement.c(785): gst_type_find_element_activate (): /GstPlayBin:play/GstDecodeBin:decodebin0/GstTypeFindElement:typefind: Can't typefind empty stream ** (cheese:13657): WARNING **: could not generate thumbnail for /home/blackmaster/Videos/Webcam/2008-11-16-015333.ogv (video/ogg) Killed Further, I have attached other reports including warning messages etc. The webcam on my device is from Chicony VGA 24 fps UVC Webcam (HP notebook). As far as I see, this is a UVC compatible webcam. I can try to post the device information for other machines sometime in the coming week - right now I'm at home. In this below freezing cold, I don't want to go visit the lab. About driver information, is there an accurate command that can tell me what driver is in use? I installed the uvcvideo, but I don't think it worked. The device corresponding to that was /dev/media/usbvideo, but that device does not exist. There is the device /dev/video0 and I don't know which driver is being used for that. Here is lsmod output: $ lsmod | grep video uvcvideo 62728 0 compat_ioctl32 9344 1 uvcvideo videodev 41344 1 uvcvideo v4l1_compat 22404 2 uvcvideo,videodev video 25104 0 output 11008 1 video usbcore 148848 6 uvcvideo,usb_storage,libusual,uhci_hcd,ehci_hcd If you tell me what command I should use, I can give you this information immediately. OGG files are fine with me. Thanks, Balaji
so could you please tell us, which version you are using? as this does not seem like a 2.24.x version. just have a look at the about window
Created attachment 122769 [details] About Cheese dialog snapshot As far as I see this is 2.24.1. The closest match of Cheese version that I find on the bug report page is 2.24.x. Is there something wrong in my report then?
I may be wrong but I think you're experiencing one of the possible issues caused by bug #559057 (read my last comment to that bug). There is a bug with uvcvideo that prevents to access the webcam device twice or more with the same resolution and framerate settings. So when you start cheese the device is being opened once to show you the preview then it's closed and reopened to start the recording pipeline. The webcam hangs so you won't get any recorded video. Please take a look at the correspondent launchpad bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cheese/+bug/290506 Particularly, take a look at Stefan Bader comments, he prepared a kernel package with the fix. Please test it and tell us if it fixes your issue. If so, report it there to so that we have more chances to get that fix included in intrepid soon. Regarding cheese -v empty output that's quite strange...
Thanks Filippo and sorry for the slow response. I tested the kernel. I installed the following packages: linux-image-2.6.27-8, kernel-image-2.6.27-8 and kernel-image-2.6.27-8-generic. When I boot up with the new kernel, I immediately have a kernel panic. If you can tell me how I can save the output on the screen anywhere I'll do that, but from what I see, the CAPS lock simply blinks repeatedly and nothing works. No even Ctrl-Alt-Del. I am forced to only power off the system. Repeatedly this is a problem. It says something like "couldn't mount the file system". So I tried to install fs-core-modules-2.6.27-8-generic. This does not install complaining that it cannot overwrite the kernel object file and hence crashes. If I try to report the crash, crash reporter says that "It is not a genuine Ubuntu version"!!?? So I am stuck. My hunch is that you are probably right in that yes, the v4l/v4l2 loads twice and hangs the device. This seems to happen even when I load gstreamer-properties. When I test my video capture it works the first time, but not afterwards. But the solution proposed is not helping me. Because this might be of interest to even Stefan Bader, I'll post my findings on the Launchpad bug that you have mentioned. From my findings, I guess this kernel package should not go into the next version of the kernel - unless I made some mistake and I have to install some other packages. What next? How do we fix this?
Sorry, I take it back. This works great! I uninstaled all other kernel packages and installed only the linux-image-2.6.27-8 package and Cheese works like a dream! Sorry for the trouble. I will try to use this kernel on all the other machines and see what happens. Thanks, Balaji
(In reply to comment #12) > Sorry, I take it back. This works great! I uninstaled all other kernel packages > and installed only the linux-image-2.6.27-8 package and Cheese works like a > dream! > > Sorry for the trouble. I will try to use this kernel on all the other machines > and see what happens. I'm glad it's fixed :) Let's hope it will get into intrepid soon! Anyway, I'm marking this bug as duplicate of bug #559057. Feel free to reopen it if you find out that other machines have a different issue. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 559057 ***