Webcam issue

pixelbit · 2015-12-14T18:13:47.000Z

Hi. I recently purchased an GL-AR150, which I am enjoying a lot!

I have connected a USB webcam and looking for some help

This is a link to the webcam: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-USB-5M-Retractable-Clip-WebCam-Web-Camera-Laptop-Hot-Worldwide/32289002234.html
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When I visit the Video page in the GL-Net interface I can see the camera is detected, but there is no image displayed. Trying different resolution and framerate does not help.

I can see that the image location is http://192.168.8.1/stream and when I visit that directly in the browser, I see “500 - Internal Server Error”

How can I see exactly what error is occurring?

I have tried enabling logging by editing /etc/lighthttpd/lighthttpd.conf but not even sure if lighthttpd is involved at all. In any case, I am not seeing any logs being generated. It would help me make progress if I could see the log of the “Internal Server Error”, but don’t know what steps to take.

Any suggestions?

alzhao · 2015-12-15T10:58:10.000Z

I am familiar with the shape of this camera, not sure if this is the same product.

The camera works with OpenWrt AA1209 but don’t works with BB1407 and later one. Also even in AA1209, it consumes a lot of CPU resource and performs bad.

I also tested on ubuntu, it also takes too much CPU power.

Not recommend!

This may or may not related to lighttpd. Try this http://192.168.8.1:8083/?action=stream or http://192.168.8.1:8083/?action=snapshot to see if you get anything. If you can see the video, it means a problem of lighttpd. If you see nothing, it means a problem of the driver then.

pixelbit · 2015-12-15T22:38:38.000Z

Thank you so much for your reply. Yes! From your suggestion I was able to get it working in AA1209, but very low resolution and bad frame rate. Not sure why it is completely broken in BB.

My camera almost exactly the same as pictured here: Cheap USB Web Camera teardown, analysis and examples

So I think I have learned that this camera is YUV only and relies on the JPG compression by software, which is too CPU intensive for mini routers anyway.

A what a shame, it works very well in windows (for the $2 price!)

Do you have any suggestion or links for very low cost webcam that will work well with the AR150 running OpenWrt?

frietpan · 2015-12-16T06:21:50.000Z

This is mostlikely not a UVC webcam.

https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/webcam
http://sourceforge.net/p/mjpg-streamer/wiki/Home/
http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/UVC_Webcam_Devices

en.wikipedia.org

USB video device class

The USB video device class (also USB video class or UVC) is a USB device class that describes devices capable of streaming video like webcams, digital camcorders, transcoders, analog video converters and still-image cameras. The latest revision of the USB video class specification carries the version number 1.5 and was defined by the USB Implementers Forum in a set of documents describing both the basic protocol and the different payload formats. Webcams were among the first devices to support ...