[RESPONDED] Webcam too dark/not working

12th gen Framework with Ubuntu 22.10

The webcam isn’t working. It’s very dark; black unless a flashlight is shining at it.

I’ve installed guvcview and adjusted all the settings, it helps a little but it’s still not functional.

Using v4l2-ctl --list-devices gives me this:
Laptop Camera: Laptop Camera (usb-0000:00:14.0-7):
/dev/video0
/dev/video1
/dev/media0

Not sure how to proceed. (I’m new to Linux.)

I’d recommend sending a message to support. They can help you out with software troubleshooting, but it could also be a hardware issue, which they can also help you out with.

If you want to do some things on your own first, I would first remove the bezel to see if that could be obscuring your camera in some way. You could also try a live-USB of a different distro like Fedora to see if the camera works there.

That’s a great idea, I’ll try a different distro.

Previously, I was using Windows and it worked fine. I think it’s the OS.

Hi @Sara, this will likely end up in my ticket queue, so I can start here.

Please install this program so we can get a better look at how Linux is seeing your webcam settings. In a terminal window, paste the following:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

then

sudo apt install guvcview

Now open guvcview from applications.

You should be looking at something that looks like this. Note, the camera window with the video coming from your camera is likely below this window. So you can press the Alt and Tab keys together to move this around to see the video window.

With your guvcview window opened up like mine, please press F11/PRT SCR key to take a screenshot of your guvcview settings.

If it looks different than mine, in guvcview, goto Settings, Hardware Defaults and select it.

Like I mentioned in my post, I’ve already installed guvcview and adjusted the settings. I’ve also changed it back to Hardware Defaults.
That did not fix the problem. It seems to only be an issue with Ubuntu, not other distros.

Something is definitely odd. Two things strike me as extremely odd.

  • Only has affected Ubuntu, not other distros as you indicated.
  • Resetting to hardware defaults is not helping.

Just to rule this out as it feels very odd that it would affect one distro, can you try brightness is up to at least to 47%, then place a light in front of you and the laptop (not behind). Does this make any difference?

If it does not, then I would need to see actual image examples to get a better handle as to what is happening. Random things in front of the camera would be fine.