pwc webcam activity light is on by default

[Suzan]

On Ubuntu startup, my webcam is already active (the red light on my webcam shows me).

It's active BEFORE I start any program. When I start a program like camorama it works properly and after I close the program, everything's OK: the webcam-light is out, the webcam is no more in use.

Isn't it the right way, that the cam will be activated AFTER the access of a webcam-program?

[Vassilis Pandis (pandisv)]

Is this still a problem with Dapper and/or Edgy? If yes, can you please provide some more details (such as the output of 'dmesg', 'lspci -vv' ) ? Thanks.

[Suzan (suzan72)]

Yes, it's still a problem with Dapper and Edgy.

I attach the output of "dmesg" and "lspci -vv".

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

Could you please check just after startup what processes are accessing your webcam, if any ? You can use lsof on your device to sort it out. If you need any help, feel free to ask.

If there are none, it could be a driver issue.

[Suzan (suzan72)]

It seems that no process access my webcam on startup. I tested this with lsof.

Hm... maybe it could be a driver issue. My webcam uses the pwc-driver. In edgys kernel the pwc-module is absolutely crippled and produces only grey images, so I have to install it manually.

See for this Bug #56090

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

Good idea. If you could test with the driver included in the kernel that you can find at http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/, we could tell whether it is a duplicate or not.

Thanks!

[IbeeX (ibrkanac)]

Hi I am using fiesty and bug is still present to fix it I installed latest snapshot driver and after running this command
setpwc -k 0
light go off
I hawe philips SPC900NC camera

[Ben Collins (ben-collins)]

This bug will not get fixed in an already stable release. Please test Gutsy Gibbon, Tribe-2 and report your findings here. If it does affect Gutsy as well, add an "Also Affects: Distro..." for Ubuntu/linux-source-2.6.22 and update the information in this bug report.