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In recent versions of Ubuntu and in some computers, Cheese keeps saying:

There was an error playing video from the webcam

A bug was reported in Launchpad, which has not been solved.

The external webcam in my system is Logitech C170.

Screenshot showcasing the issue

user.dz
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Archisman Panigrahi
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1 Answers1

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For some reason, the default picture resolution in Cheese is set too high for some webcams.

  1. Open Preferences, and change these resolutions to the lowest.

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2.Now restart cheese.

3.The webcam should work. Keep increasing the resolution until it stops working again.

Archisman Panigrahi
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    That's a workaround, not a solution. Cheese should support all resolutions listed. – 13rac1 Jul 11 '16 at 16:42
  • @eosrei Maybe, the webcam cannot provide that resolution? Because in my desktop this problem persists, but my laptop's internal webcam has no problem with higher resolution. What cheese should do is to check the webcam's maximum capability – Archisman Panigrahi Jul 11 '16 at 16:52
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    That's what Cheese is already doing. The listed resolutions are returned from the webcam driver. I've gone through compiling the entire video4linux stack related to this issue. The problem is summarized by: v4l-convert: libjpeg error: End Of Image The solution is probably a patch to the frame decoding libraries to handle the video colorspace/format. – 13rac1 Jul 11 '16 at 17:01
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    My webcam displays nothing at any resolution, including 160x120 – Aaron Franke Jan 12 '18 at 05:13
  • This does not work at all for me; cheese only provides a single choice for resolution, and it matches that of my camera. – Pointy Aug 06 '21 at 00:28