Comment 201 for bug 290506

For those having problems with cheese and webcams, you might want to try running the following script on a terminal window:

while true; do echo > /dev/null; done

Doing that eliminates the hang ups and super slow frame rate problems I was having with cheese and my two different webcams. It appears cheese or the gstreamer/v4l2 layers underneath malfunction whenever the CPU frequency on my laptop is at its lowest level of 800MHz. When that script is running it makes the kernel hike the frequency to the max of 2.4GHz and cheese starts working perfectly. Stop the script and the frequency drops to 800MHz and cheese starts malfunctioning again.

The command "gst-launch v4l2src ! xvimagesink" behaves exactly like cheese on my laptop. The luvcview program also does the same thing even though it calls directly into v4l2 instead of going through gstreamer.

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