Webcam (in Cheese) has become extremely slow

I don’t use my webcam that much and I don’t know which update may have caused this, however my Logitech BRIO is very slow in Cheese and in OBS Studio the camera output is flickering black and white with a negative-like effect.

How can I diagnose and fix this problem?

Hey there,
Cheese is one of those things that just seems to be constantly broken.
I dunno. Talk to the gnome people :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

That said … last time I looked at this it appeared cheese wasnt sourcing the video device path properly.

Setting it directly worked* … and I ended up being able to automate it using a line like this:

cheese -d $(find /dev/vid* -name "video*" -print| tail -n 1)

( * - most of the time. It seems maybe 50-75% … not entirely sure what the base issue is and/or why it is unreliable. Sorry. I dont use Gnome)

[Note - this was mainly for cheese not launching at all, though I noticed some workarounds would attempt to use sudo which would ‘work’ but result in slow recording, and other such similar ‘slow’ anomalies … hence the above content being considered related]

Two things:

  • I guess I have to give KDE another try. For some reason I have never felt impressed by it. Icons are not consistent and have a childish cartoon-like feel to them. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:
  • For God knows why reason* (I think it might be due to BRIO supporting Windows Hello), whenever I connect it to my PC it shows up as 4 distinct webcams where only 1 is working (and I have never had the chance to make the 4K@60 mode working).

But thanks for the advice. Will look into it.

* I actually called God’s hotline and he said he doesn’t know either. He said his tech guy, Satan, isn’t around to help him diagnose it. I reminded him he kicked his ass out of heaven and he started crying like a baby. Dunno man. Weird stuff.