In Linux, various USB camera interfaces exist, each with its own kernel driver family. UVC (USB Video Class) with its driver uvcvideo is a modern one that is supported by most software. Other cameras require other drivers and might have difficulties to work with modern camera software.

Webcams require a kernel driver and if available files like /dev/video0 pop up. Check what drivers got loaded lsmod.

v4l2-ctl --list-devices will show the attached cameras and its /dev/video<n> files

Does it make sense to setup an old camera with 640*480 resolution? Modern cameras are cheap have much higher resolution and the desired software interface.

c45:6028 Microdia Typhoon Easycam USB 330K (older)

USB cameras require lot of processing in the camera and are also less flexible and support less feature than required and possible.

libcamera moves this software and processing to the user space. It sill communicated using (but many) /dev/video<x> files but has its own API for the user space application.

Test it with (put the camera into light, otherwise debug for no reason could happen):

qv4l2 it is a gui tool that might be already installed

guvcview or guvcview -d /dev/video<n>

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:device=/dev/video0

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=352:height=288:device=/dev/video0

and mplayer can take even screen-shots pressing key s with

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=352:height=288:device=/dev/video0 -vf screenshot

cheese a gui tool from gnome

xawtv -c /dev/video0 is the classic video application but more dedicated for TV cards.

The sensor chips of web cams would support usually IR and would therefore suitable to view and record pictures in the dark when having IR illumination. However the cameras have a IR filter that blocks IR and therefore the cameras can not be used in dark environment. On some cameras the IR filter can be removed, others have a support move it in and out (makes a click sound) and others are sold without IR filter. An other problem is that the focus for IR is different than from visible light, so the position of the lenses need to be adjusted.

motion is a camera surveillance application https://motion-project.github.io/.

Check if the camera works (install cheese)

Then install motion.

Edit /etc/motion/motion.conf

comments use ; and indicates how a configuration line could look like.

motion supports more than one camera so it is modular to to have a configuration file as camera-fontastic.conf and therefore settings per camera. Add full path information to the camera file in motion.conf and comment out camera_dir.

; camera_dir
camera /etc/motion/camera-fontastic.conf 

video_device /dev/video1

video_device /dev/v4l/by-path/platform-xhci-hcd.0-usb-0:1:1.0-video-index0

sudo systemctl start motion

sudo systemctl stop motion

sudo systemctl restart motion

sudo systemctl status motion

sudo systemctl show motion

The link http://localhost:8080 should show the live stream from the camera

To have it accessible by other hosts (especially when motion runs on a headless system)

webcontrol_localhost off
stream_localhost off

log goes to /var/log/motion/motion.log. The log_level can be adjusted to get the desired amount of log messages.

Captured streams and pictures are found per default in /var/lib/motion

movie_output off

area_detect 124578

mask_file <filename>.pgm

snapshot_interval 3600
snapshot_filename snapshot-%Y%m%d%H%M

# Level of log messages [1..9] (EMG, ALR, CRT, ERR, WRN, NTC, INF, DBG, ALL).
log_level 8