Logitech, Inc. Webcam C270 on Raspberry Pi

Just a small note. I tried to get my Logitech, Inc. Webcam C270 running on an raspberry pi v1 running raspbian wheezy and ran into some problems.

The webcam can be used on linux with the uvcvideo kernel module but using uvccapture did not work for me.

$ dmesg
uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (046d:0825)
input: UVC Camera (046d:0825) as /devices/.../input/input0
usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo

Running uvccapture:

$ uvccapture
ERROR opening V4L interface
: No such file or directory

Mplayer didn’t work either with various settings – producing green only images.

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0 -vo png -frames 1

Then I found out there is a limited set of formats your camera can deliver and how to display:

$  v4l2-ctl --list-formats -d /dev/video0
ioctl: VIDIOC_ENUM_FMT
        Index       : 0
        Type        : Video Capture
        Pixel Format: 'YUYV'
        Name        : YUV 4:2:2 (YUYV)

        Index       : 1
        Type        : Video Capture
        Pixel Format: 'MJPG' (compressed)
        Name        : MJPEG

Seems like I can capture images in YUYV Format and MJPEG directly. This led me to vgrabbj which seems to be a highly flexible image grabber. The following command works for me:

$  vgrabbj -q 100 -i vga -o jpg -f /tmp/snap.jpg -e -d /dev/video0

So, give vgrabbj a try.