Camera input in web browsers (video conferencing)

A

Atsuri

I decided to try Google Hangouts on FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE. I installed www/chromium as that's the only browser that has the Hangouts plugin integrated and works out-of-the-box. Also, my PC is a 2013 ASUS S301A ultrabook.

To cut the story short, I managed to get my webcam to work by installing multimedia/webcamd, multimedia/v4l_compat and multimedia/v4l-utils. All of the mentioned packages were built from ports. Then, I altered /etc/rc.conf:
Code: 
webcamd_enable="YES"
and /boot/loader.conf:
Code: 
cuse_load="YES"
Finally, I launched the webcamd daemon, linked it to the USB webcam (Azurewave) and made the webcam device available to all users:
Code: 
service webcamd start
webcamd -d ugen0.2 -i 0 -i 0 &
chmod 666 /dev/video0
The chmod 666 /dev/video0 is a temporary solution. It gets lost after reboot. To allow the user to use the /dev/video0 device permanently, one needs to add him/her to the webcamd group:
Code: 
pw groupmod webcamd <user>

The webcam gave a very nice output in multimedia/pwcview, however Chromium still fails to recognize the /dev/video0 device...

Any ideas?

EDIT1:
www/firefox also does not recognize the /dev/video0 device and tries to use /dev/fake_device0 instead.
MacBook mid-2009 iSight camera works more or less out-of-the-box. webcamd does not need to be specifically attached to the USB webcam device.
 
Last edited:
Also having this problem. I have a feeling it could be resolved somewhere in ~/.config/chromium but not really sure..
 
There are reports that chromium/Hangouts is working defective on Linux platforms, last reports till July 2016, up to chromium version 53.0.xxx. To make sure if Hangouts is working at all with your installed dependencies, you could try it first on www/firefox with the hangouts plugin.

If it’s working with Firefox take a closer look to this comment #90, comment #97, and comment #102., which notes Chromium version 53.0.2782.3 does not include the patch. FreeBSD's www/chromium port is at version 52.0.2743.116_2. It may take a while until the port is upgraded with the patched version.
 
Thank you everyone for the feedback! I recently returned to FreeBSD after a distro-hopping bonanza and managed to get a few things working relatively out-of-the-box. I will now resume my fight with www/chromium. I read about Chromium related issues on Fedora and other distributions recently, though I would like to separate these from the problems we have on FreeBSD. Entirely different platforms ;).

T-Daemon said:
There are reports that chromium/Hangouts is working defective on Linux platforms, last reports till July 2016, up to chromium version 53.0.xxx. To make sure if Hangouts is working at all with your installed dependencies, you could try it first on www/firefox with the hangouts plugin.

If it’s working with Firefox take a closer look to this comment #90, comment #97, and comment #102., which notes Chromium version 53.0.2782.3 does not include the patch. FreeBSD's www/chromium port is at version 52.0.2743.116_2. It may take a while until the port is upgraded with the patched version.
Click to expand...

Do you mean then a the GNU/Linux Firefox Hangouts plugin? How would this work with our native www/firefox port?

In principle, /dev/video0 IS also the default webcam device on GNU/Linux systems and it works there (same equipment on multiple GNU/Linux distros, just to clarify). Thereby, on the surface there seems to be no reason why the same device name should not be recognized on FreeBSD. I will turn to the Chromium vast source code to try and work out some of the issues I mentioned :).
 
Hangouts works just fine through GMail on Firefox and Chromium. I use it often but not the video only because I don't have a camera attached to my workstation.
Atsuri said:
I will turn to the Chromium vast source code to try and work out some of the issues I mentioned
Click to expand...
Don't even try. The published requirements include at least 10GB of ram to compile but that isn't realistic. 32GB means you will keep your compile under two hours. The current maintainer says he's having problems because his current build needs 64GB.

And we're not even talking about the time it takes to come up to speed on the code.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Hangouts works just fine through GMail on Firefox and Chromium. I use it often but not the video only because I don't have a camera attached to my workstation.

Don't even try. The published requirements include at least 10GB of ram to compile but that isn't realistic. 32GB means you will keep your compile under two hours. The current maintainer says he's having problems because his current build needs 64GB.

And we're not even talking about the time it takes to come up to speed on the code.
Click to expand...

That sounds daunting, I agree. Last time I checked on Gentoo, the source code would include a warning that least 2 GB RAM is required for the build process. I guess that's old news then :(. If getting around the camera issues proves too troublesome, I might just switch to something more compatible later...

Do you mean that the sound works fine via either the additional plugin on Firefox and the built-in in Chromium? I know that the plugin launches on Chromium, but as I mentioned early on, there is no camera input from /dev/video0. To my Windows-only parents that's a bit of a deal-breaker, really.
 
I don't know anything about any plugin. GMail comes with Hangouts built in and I've used it on Chrome and Firefox. Or at least I don't recall installing anything and I don't have any installed extensions for it.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I don't know anything about any plugin. GMail comes with Hangouts built in and I've used it on Chrome and Firefox. Or at least I don't recall installing anything and I don't have any installed extensions for it.
Click to expand...

The video call feature requires a plugin to work in www/firefox. Perhaps the standard phone call doesn't require plugins. Just checked it :).
 
Yes, you are right. On Chromium I didn't have to but I may have installed it years ago and just don't remember. On Firefox, the button is there but, when clicked, it asks to install the plugin.
 
So since my last writing I switched computers to a MacBook mid-2009 series and FreeBSD 11-STABLE to get a bit closer to recent development. The iSight webcam works much like it worked previously on the ASUS S301A ultrabook. I explored the https://meet.jit.si/ browser version of net-im/jitsi. Unfortunately, it seems the webcam is detected as /dev/fake_device0 also on www/firefox! It might be a general browser problem and as Firefox is far less troublesome to work with than Chromium, I will probably switch to that and continue testing.
 
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