Wednesday 13 June 2018

Twitch Experience: I Gots Me A Webcam


After 2 weeks on Twitch it was time to hook up a Webcam. I'm not sure how I would feel about this so the obvious thing to do was to quickly get my hands on a cheap webcam. $1.00 from Trademe, even though it was only 480p, perfect for what I want to do for now and in 3 days was on my doorstep.

You would think a simple device like this would work perfectly the moment you inserted the USB plug. Well yes, kind of. I got no indication/alert telling me a new hardware device has become available. So now what. Linux Software Manager opened to find a webcam program which resulted in a program called Cheese. Installed, ran it, it didn't acknowledge the presence of the webcam. For the next hour I was singing a different version of "Oh happy days" until I decided to do a reboot. It works, hallelujah! I see me on screen and go, geez who's this ugly bugga.

So I closed down Cheese, set up my Twitching environment, added a source using the webcam option, and it did not find the webcam. Here we go, another chorus of "Oh happy days" starts. So once again, started up Cheese and yes, once again Cheese didn't acknowledge the webcam. Well the obvious conclusion was, if you wish to use the webcam that day, do not close webcam window because if you do, you have to reboot the computer!

Using Cheese was fine, but I wanted to use the webcam without this program, it has issues and every time it crashes it was reboot time, so it was BASH time:-

ls -ltr /dev/video*

Use this to find what port Linux recognises the webcam

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:device=/dev/video0 -fps 60

This will bring up a window showing, well your face :-)
It is this window I use as the source for OBS


Yes the quality is awful, and I intend on getting a real webcam like a Logitech 920 after watching and talking to Jade from Twitch.

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