The Xbox live Vision camera. There’s a lot of these things floating around but just not enough good uses when connected to your Xbox 360. Up until recently (The release of Hardy Heron) It was fairly painstaking to get this working. But now you can have it up and streaming to the web in a couple minutes.
What you’ll need
- A Computer running Ubuntu (8.04 Hardy Heron) http://www.ubuntu.com
- An Xbox LIVE Vision Cam http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/x/xboxlivevision/
- A Free USB 2.0 port on your computer (IT HAS TO BE USB 2.0 a 1.1 port will not work)
- A Web browser (Preferably FireFox http://www.getfirefox.com
Now that we have all the pieces lets get to work.
Lets cut right to the chase.
Plug your Xbox LIVE cam into the USB 2.0 port on your Ubuntu box.
Open a terminal window and type
sudo modprobe uvcvideo
press return.
You should be prompted for your password. If you don’t get any errors the command was successful.
You can double check this by typing
lsmod |grep uvcvideo
The output should look like this
uvcvideo 58116 1 compat_ioctl32 2304 1 uvcvideo videodev 29312 2 uvcvideo v4l1_compat 15492 2 uvcvideo,videodev v4l2_common 18304 2 uvcvideo,videodev usbcore 146028 4 uvcvideo,ehci_hcd,ohci_hcd
At this point Ubuntu knows how to use our Xbox LIVE Cam but we don’t have any software to pull the video out.
We’ll install a nice little peripheral app for UVCVideo that streams your camera live.
lets make a temporary folder to work in.
mkdir /home/username/uvcwork cd /home/username/uvcwork wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mjpg-streamer/mjpg-streamer_r64-1_i386.deb
(Or download from the SourceForge project page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mjpg-streamer/)
dpkg -i ./mjpg-streamer_r64-1_i386.deb
That’s it the MJPG streamer is now installed.
Start it up with the following command
mjpg_streamer -i "input_uvc.so -d /dev/video0 -f 15 -r 640x480" -o "output_http.so -p 8080 -w ./"
If it works you should get the following back on the terminal and the green ring should light up on the camera
MJPG Streamer Version.: 2.0 i: Using V4L2 device.: /dev/video0 i: Desired Resolution: 640 x 480 i: Frames Per Second.: 15 i: Format............: MJPEG o: www-folder-path...: ./ o: HTTP TCP port.....: 8080 o: username:password.: disabled o: commands..........: enabled
Lets test it out. Go to the following address
http://your.ip.address:8080/?action=stream
Replace “your.ip.address” with the IP address or hostname of the computer you’ve plugged the camera into
If everything went well you should be seeing the view from your camera.
*NOTE: Sometimes mjpg_streamer refuses to start with an error. The following sequence of commands usually resolves it
sudo rmmod uvcvideo sudo modprobe uvcvideo
In my next article we’ll be adding motion detection to this setup. Make sure and check back
i got an error when i was trying to open the command after installing the package. this is what the terminal said to me:
aaron@aaron-desktop:~$ mjpg_streamer -i “input_uvc.so -d /dev/video0 -f 15 -r 640×480″ -o “output_http.so -p 8080 -w ./”
MJPG Streamer Version.: 2.0
i: Using V4L2 device.: /dev/video0
i: Desired Resolution: 640 x 480
i: Frames Per Second.: 15
i: Format…………: MJPEG
ERROR opening V4L interface: No such file or directory
Init v4L2 failed !! exit fatal
i: init_VideoIn failed
also. i’d like to point out that my inital check with the command “lsmod |grep uvcvideo” read something like this:
aaron@aaron-desktop:~$ lsmod |grep uvcvideo
uvcvideo 58116 0
compat_ioctl32 2304 1 uvcvideo
videodev 29440 1 uvcvideo
v4l1_compat 15492 2 uvcvideo,videodev
v4l2_common 18304 2 uvcvideo,videodev
usbcore 146028 3 uvcvideo,ohci_hcd
note the very last line. i also tried the fix at the bottom, but it didn’t work. i’m in desperate need of a cam! need help plz!
thanks btw, you’ve gotten me further than anything else i’ve tried so far
if you run ls /dev/video* What do you get back?
I have the same problem as Aaron. When I type ls /dev/video*, I get ”cannot access no such file or directory”
Same probs, modprobe isnt finding the cam. dont know why.
dev/video*: No such file or directory
Same here
My error message: ERROR OPENING V4L INTERFACE: NO SUCH FILE OR DIRECTORY
and when I checked in /dev/video* wow there is none!! where I can find it?
Hey Eric. if you tried
sudo rmmod uvcvideo
sudo modprobe uvcvideo
with no change then it may be the version of uvcvideo on your system. Mine worked out of the box but it looks like some people need to upgrade so try this.
install svn
sudo apt-get install svn
download the latest version ov uvcvideo
svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk
move to the new folder
cd ./trunk
edit the Makefile
gedit ./Makefile
and change
INSTALL_MOD_DIR := usb/media
to
INSTALL_MOD_DIR := kernel/ubuntu/media/usbvideo
save your changes
compile the driver
make
then install
make install
Now reboot and walk through the steps in the article again.
Let me know if this helps or not
mjpg streamer isn’t supported by amd64. Any help?
Was able to get the camera to connect fine to the system without any errors, but it only transmits a gray image. Doesn't matter whether I open the cam in Skype or via the mjpg-streamer. Green light turns on, I know it's working… but showing only gray. Thoughts? Using Ubuntu 9.10.
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