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Limited camera resolution on Raspberry Pi 4 with VL805 firmware 0x000137ab #621
Description
What were you doing?
Trying to watch the webcam stream on Raspberry Pi 4 with VL805 firmware 0x000137ab.
Webcam: "ID 1871:0141 Aveo Technology Corp. Camera"
It worked before. Now it doesn't work (I can see only "webcam stream loading")
(for a possible solution see below)
What did you expect to happen?
Webcam stream displayed.
What happened instead?
No webcam stream displayed. I can see only "webcam stream loading"
Did the same happen when running OctoPrint in safe mode?
yes
Version of OctoPi
OctoPrint 1.3.12 running on OctoPi 0.17.0
Printer model & used firmware incl. version
n/a
Screenshot(s)/video(s) showing the problem:
n/a
Investigation
The problem seems to be connected to a bug in 0x000137ab firmware of VL805.
First enable uvcvideo debugging and show the log:
echo 0xffff > /sys/module/uvcvideo/parameters/trace
dmesg -wStreaming very low resolutions seems to work fine:
./mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w ./www-octopi -n" -i "input_uvc.so -y -r QVGA -d /dev/video0"But trying to stream even in 640x480 (VGA) doesn't work:
./mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w ./www-octopi -n" -i "input_uvc.so -y -r VGA -d /dev/video0"you can see a lot of uvcvideo: USB isochronous frame lost (-18). lines in the dmesg logs and i: select() timeout in the mjpg_streamer's output.
Now run (as root):
setpci -s 01:00.0 0xD4.B=0x41(see: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=244421 for details)
Problem solved, the stream works fine!
Possible solution
You have to run the setpci command after each boot, so I've modified /root/bin/webcamd to do it for me:
--- webcamd.orig 2019-12-22 22:42:23.812714213 +0100
+++ webcamd 2019-12-22 22:51:21.563037412 +0100
@@ -116,6 +116,33 @@
function runMjpgStreamer {
input=$1
+ # There are problems with 0x000137ab firmware on VL805.
+ # It seems to work fine on 0x00013701
+ # It may be upgraded someday... display a warning and do nothing (it may just work!)
+ echo "Checking for vl805..."
+ if [[ -f /usr/bin/vl805 ]]; then
+ VL805_VERSION=$(/usr/bin/vl805)
+ VL805_VERSION=${VL805_VERSION#*: }
+ echo " - version 0x${VL805_VERSION} detected"
+ case "$VL805_VERSION" in
+ 00013701)
+ echo " - nothing to be done. It shouldn't cause USB problems."
+ ;;
+ 000137ab)
+ echo -e " - \e[31mThis version is known to cause problems with USB cameras.\e[39m"
+ echo -e " You may want to downgrade to 0x0013701."
+ echo -e " - [FIXING] Trying the setpci -s 01:00.0 0xD4.B=0x41 hack to mitigate the issue"
+ echo -e " It disables ASPM L1 on the VL805"
+ setpci -s 01:00.0 0xD4.B=0x41
+ ;;
+ *)
+ echo " - unknown firmware version. Doing nothing."
+ ;;
+ esac
+ else
+ echo " - It seems that you don't have VL805 (Raspberry Pi 4). There should be no problems with USB (a.k.a. select() timeout)"
+ fi
+
pushd $MJPGSTREAMER_HOME > /dev/null 2>&1
echo Running ./mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w $camera_http_webroot $camera_http_options" -i "$input"
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w $camera_http_webroot $camera_http_options" -i "$input" &I'm not an expert on Linux. The real cause and/or solution may be completely different.
Activity
guysoft commentedon Dec 30, 2019
Would love a PR if you have a fully drafted solution. It would make this go in faster.
guysoft commentedon Dec 31, 2019
Fixed by #623
looxonline commentedon Jan 20, 2020
You should also add FW version 000137a8. Just spent half a day struggling to figure it out only to find that I had that version out the box and it suffers from the same issue. In any case I'm using a PS3eye which does not support mjpg and has to encode on the fly so I changed over to ustreamer which uses 9% CPU instead of 35% with mjpg. Still suffered with the same issue though. PCIe fix works.