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09 March 2012

97. Adjusting webcam sensitivity/brightness on linux

The past year I've had problems with web cams on debian -- some of them look fine, some are way too dark, but either way, I had no good method of adjusting any of the settings. Cheese could be used for some settings, but it's not enough.

Yesterday I was greeted with this image:



While I could probably let in a bit more light in my office, it's still on the dark side...

There are command line tools for adjusting v4l devices (e.g. v4l-conf), but in this particular case a GUI tool would come in handy -- v4l2ucp. It can be installed from the standard debian repos.


Auto Gain can't be turned off for the zc3xx driver. Turns out that the "Light frequency filter" was set to no flicker by default. Changing it to 50 or 60 Hz lead to the image below:


The number of settings you can change depends on your driver --  below is the v4l2ucp window for an integrated thinkpad webcam:


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5 comments:

  1. Emil05 November, 2012 03:44

    Thanks for this post, I had the same problem on my ThinkPad Edge 15` running Linux Mint 13. I found out that the "Exposure, Auto Priority" box has to be checked in order for the camera to adjust according to the light in the room.

    ReplyDelete
  2. skribi20 September, 2013 09:53

    Thank you so much. I had problems with a Creative Labs VF0070. I was bright sensible. With v4l2upc i could reduce the Exposure and finally see something different than white.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous24 November, 2013 07:00

    There is also gtk-v4l for those whose distributions don't package v4l2upc

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous06 October, 2014 06:04

    Thanks so much! Fixed a problem I have been having for a long time :)

    ReplyDelete