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Comments on With a V4L2-compatible webcam, how to see its video feed for the purpose of adjusting aiming?

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With a V4L2-compatible webcam, how to see its video feed for the purpose of adjusting aiming?

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I have ordered (but am still waiting for it to arrive) a USB-connected webcam that is supposed to be V4L2 compatible.

Once it arrives, I'm obviously going to want to mount it such that it provides a reasonable picture with minimal ongoing adjustments. I imagine that the easiest way to do so is to simply run some application that shows me what the camera is seeing, and then adjust the camera as needed to get a good result.

The system in question is currently running Debian 10/Buster, but upgrading to 11/Bullseye is on my to-do list, so a solution should ideally work with both of those, preferably without having to download and install out-of-repository applications on either (so any tools suggested should be in both the buster and bullseye Debian repositories).

I found qv4l2 ("test bench application for video4linux devices") which looks somewhat promising for making adjustments, but I haven't found anything that will let me actually see what the webcam is seeing.

How can I accomplish the latter?

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2 comment threads

Expected use cases (2 comments)
Green playback button? (2 comments)
Expected use cases
Peter Taylor‭ wrote over 2 years ago

What software are you expecting to use the camera with? In my experience, most software that supports webcams has a preview mode of some kind, so you may not need to install anything extra at all.

Canina‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Peter Taylor‭ Right now I don't have any specific software in mind other than Microsoft Teams running inside a Windows VM which I'm stuck with for work. It may well turn out to be various web applications running inside a browser instance, for one thing. Also, I would rather have one solution which works the same each time to get me up to speed, than having to hunt around in each different application just to do the same thing there. If something like Quasímodo‭'s suggestion works, that's something I can add a launcher for and always have available in the same spot no matter what software is otherwise involved, which is something I would much prefer.