Black video from webcam in Cheese and Skype

[halfbeing]

The following bug affects both Cheese and Skype, but not guvcview.

I had an intermittent problem of the video feed from the webcam failing, apparently after waking from sleep. When I opened Cheese or the video in Skype I would see just black. When this happened the light on the camera would not come on. However the video feed to guvcview continued to work fine and the light would come on in that case. I noticed that this problem became a lot less frequent when I switched from Unity to XFCE, as did another problem of networking failing on waking from sleep, so I suspect there may be a connection between these two problems.

What used to happen was that I would either reboot or simply log out and log back into my gui session and the video from the camera would be restored. However when the problem reoccurred yesterday nothing I did would bring the video back to Cheese and Skype, not even rebooting, running Cheese as root or starting a gui session as a different user. This means that video to Cheese and, much more importantly, to Skype is now permanently disabled. The one thing I noticed as being odd which might possibly have contributed to this situation is that when I logged out of my gui session and tried to log back in again, the gui failed to launch and I ended up having to reboot.

To summarise:
- Webcam video to certain applications, including Cheese and Skype, sometimes fails.
- At least one application, namely guvcview, is not affected.
- The failure is sometimes capable of persisting through several boot cycles.

Needless to say, not being able to do video chat is a very serious bug and a very good reason for a user to look for another operating system.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: cheese 3.8.3-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-15.8-lowlatency 3.11.10
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-15-lowlatency x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2.2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Jan 26 19:17:48 2014
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-08-22 (156 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Studio 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Release amd64 (20130424)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: cheese
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-10-20 (98 days ago)

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner. You reported this bug some time ago and there have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time.

Ubuntu 13.10 (saucy) reached end-of-life on July 17, 2014.

Do you still see a problem related to the one that you reported in a currently supported version of Ubuntu? Please let us know if you do and in which version of Ubuntu otherwise this report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

Paul White
[Ubuntu Bug Squad]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for cheese (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]