I believe the old 'There is an error playing video from webcam' message when I try to take a photo or record a video is related to cheese's dconf configuration.

Anyway, browsing the org.gnome.Cheese schema on dconf-editor, both 'photo-path' and 'video-path' have a similar description:

'Defines the path where the photos are stored. If empty, "XDG_PHOTO/Webcam" will be used.

'Defines the path where the videos are stored. If empty, "XDG_VIDEO/Webcam" will be used.'

The problem is that recent xdg-user-dirs and xdg-user-dirs packages are named differently.

I for instance have installed:
xdg-user-dirs 0.15
xdg-user-dirs-gtk 0.10

And running 'xdg-user-dirs-update' will write a ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs file with the following content:

---
# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
# 
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/Pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"
---

So is cheese default empty string calling the wrong directory? XDG_VIDEO instead of XDG_VIDEOS_DIR and XDG_PHOTO instead of XDG_PICTURES_DIR? Because if I set in dconf a directory I have write access to, everything is fine.