I am trying to simultaneously stream the images from 3 Logitech Webcam Pro 900 devices using OpenCV 2.1 on Ubuntu 11.10. The uvcvideo driver gets loaded for these.
Capturing two devices works fine, however with three I run into the out of space error for the third:
libv4l2: error turning on stream: No space left on device
I seem to be running into this issue:
http://renoirsrants.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/multiple-webcams-on-zoneminder.html and I have attempted to do the quirks=128 (or pretty much any other power-of-two value) trick but to no avail. I also tried on another machine with two USB 2.0 hubs and connecting two cameras to one and the third camera to the second, which resulted into the same problem. I am initializing roughly as follows (using N cameras so the result is actually put into an STL vector):
cv::VideoCapture cap0(0); //(0,1,2..)
and attempting to capture all the cameras in a loop as
cap0.retrieve(frame0);
This works fine for N=2 cameras. When I set N=3 the third window opens but no image appears and the console is spammed full of V4L2 errors. Similarly, when I set N=2, and attempt to open the third camera in say Cheese (simple webcam capture application), this doesn't work either.
Now comes the big but: After trying guvcview by starting three instances of that, I was able to view three cameras at once (with no problems in terms of frame rate or related), so it does not seem to be a hardware issue. I figure there is some property that I should set, but I'm not sure what that is. I have looked into MJPEG (which these cameras seem to support), but haven't succeeded into setting this property, or detect in which mode (yuyv?) they are running if I start them from OpenCV.
Thoughts?
Best Answer
I had this problem too and have a solution that lets me capture 2 cameras at 640x480 with mjpeg compression. I am using a Creative "Live Cam Sync HD VF0770" which incorrectly reports its bandwidth requirements. The quirks=128 fix works for 320x240 uncompressed video. But for compressed (mjpg) format the quirks=128 does not work (it does nothing for compressed formats).
To fix this I modified the uvc driver as follows:
download the kernel sources
copy uvc dir:
modify Makefile
Force bandwith to 0x400 when compressed.
build the aauvcvideo module:
remove old module and insert new one:
run gucview twice with compression in 2 different windows to test
Good luck! -Acorn