Hello,

recently I wanted to use a USB-webcam of "Hercules" on Linux Debian 10. I plugged it in, and saw that "Cheese" has recognized it, but "Skype" and "Camorama" did not. After second try even "Cheese" did not recognize a cam and showed an error "could not connect to video device (/dev/video0)".

USB-ID of the device is 06f8:3007. I searched a bit and found several posts from the past saying that this cam needs a special driver. Unfortunately, I did not find this driver on Debian 10. Can anybody give me a hint on it?

Thanks in advance
Andrey

I assume you've double-checked the cable and a different USB port to rule them out.

You might try guvcview. I've had that work when Cheese didn't. That the camera worked once with Cheese, though, is a bit puzzling. Have you tested the camera on aonther machine?

Hello,
I tried this cam on different laptops with different Linux distros. And now I tried again on Debian with "guvcview" - no video device found. But even if it would work in "guvcview" - I need it in Skype, as long as Skype does not recognize the cam, any other application is just for testing.

The cam itself reacts on plugging (blue LED goes on and off), and lsusb shows a cam with full name and ID. I suppose, it uses special driver. I tried 2 another cams - from Logitech and Medion (German hardware manufacturer), they both worked out of the box.

Regards,
Andrey

A viable work-around would be to use one of the cameras that are known to work.

A fix would be to plug in the camera, use 'lsusb -v' to get the vendorroduct id (shown as 4 digit hexadecimal numbers) then use that along with the device name to identify the proper driver if there is one. Once the driver is known then installing it is relatively straight forward.

Hello
your hint is great... the problem is that I did it already - see my first / initial post, and this brought up my question... the USB-ID is in the first post.

Regards.

This search gives several links that may help. 'debian driver 06f8:3007'

Take a look here:-

http://www.ideasonboard.org/uvc/

This is the web-page of the UVC driver project. If you scroll down to your Hercules cam (06f8:3007) you can clearly see it's definitely supported by the UVC (USB Video Class) kernel-module driver. A separate or 'special' driver is not required, since this has been a part of the kernel for quite a number of years.

I don't really understand this stuff, but for some reason your kernel doesn't appear to be loading the driver..? Therefore, "modprobe" commands may be needed, but others will have to help with those.... (sorry!)

As to the behaviour of Cheese, that's more often down to 'issues' with the gstreamer framework it runs on than anything else...


Mike.

Hello Mike,
today I experienced again that strange thing: I plugged the cam in and "Camorama" showed me an image. "Skype" also showed a cam in the list of devices. But when I removed cam and plugged it again, same error - no vide0 found.

I suppose, you are right: kernel has problems with loading required kernel module. But why? Logitech devices are recognized without any issues every time I insert them. Would be great to know a difference.

Regards
Andrey

Hello,
I have an update: today - rather occasionally -I experienced following: I plugged this cam into built-in USB port - "Camorama" says, no "vide0". But when I plugged the same cam into USB-port in the ExpressCard (I have a USB 3.0 card in my ExpressPort slot), it worked.

I suppose, there is an issue with loading kernel module when reacting to USB events. Question to kernel experts: can it be?

Regards,
Andrey