Comment 203 for bug 290506

Okay, today i gave Fedora another try and Cheese also failed there. So it looks like this is a very unfortunate situation with my particular setup. My Webcam always needs a little longer to initialize when it is plugged in and no driver was previously loaded, but other applications have no problem with that.

It might be a firmware bug or just the the way my cam is probed by cheese. I don't know. However, it is an issue and i can always reproduce by the following steps:

- unplug the cam
- sudo rmmod uvcvideo
- plug the cam
- start cheese

'cheese -v' doesn't show any errors because the probe fails gracefully after the 10 second period.
uvcvideo trace logs don't show any errors because the driver is only waiting for the first data to arrive.

So everything works as long as the camera initialization isn't interrupted - which is the case with my webcam and it's ridiculous 16 second init time. :) I realize that there is still some error elsewhere - maybe in cheese, gstreamer or the driver - but with no error messages in either the cheese logs, or the uvcvideo traces i am at the moment unable to debug this any further. I will do some more research though.

Meanwhile, I would love to see the workaround in the attached patch ( 91_raise_timeout.patch ) included in cheese for karmic. It simply raises the probing timeout from 10 to 30 seconds. This patch should not affect working cameras. However, cameras with a probing time similar to mine ( >10sec. ) will have some more time to initialize and thus get detected correctly by cheese.