Why Raspberry Pi camera "no device found" in Cheese or IceWeasel?

Question

I am testing the new Raspberry Pi 2 with its camera board.

I have setup my Pi2 with Raspbian.

I have connected the camera on the CSI port, enabled the camera module from raspi-config

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install cheese

I was able to test still and video features.

Now, how I'd like be able to check the cam on cheese or use it from my browser e.g. hangout, Firefox WebRTC ...

On Cheese the camera module is not found whereas a USB cam shows up? Same from a browser.

Why the RPi Cam module isn't found on Cheese or Browser? and can I fix it?

UPDATE when using UV4L driver

Installed the UV4L driver, I can now select the camera board from the browser when I try to start a simple webrtc session e.g. http://opentokrtc.com/testroom However when I do share Camera Board OV5647 I get a full screen snap (frozen), so I don't think it's getting a video stream from the cam, but that's already a great step forward.

Please upvote the question if you find it legit and interesting

• rob: have a look at the information here linux-projects.org/modules/sections/… it will add a uv4l driver that will make the camera available to standard linux apps. I use it for motion.
• zabumba: hey Rob, I haven't tried yet but that looks promising. You should copy and paste your message into an "Answer" (rather than comment) so that I can accept it. Up vote my question if you found it is legit. Thanks mate

Answer 1

The Raspberry Pi camera does not present itself out of the box as a standard uv4l device and as such generic Linux programs can not "see" the device.

There is a great third part tool available UV4L that will create the necessary device nodes for standard media applications.

I use it with Motion very successfully. My blog entry discussing it.

• zabumba: I followed your tips and I can now select the camera board from the browser when I try to start a simple webrtc session e.g. opentokrtc.com/testroom However when I do share "Camera Board OV5647" I get a full screen snap (frozen), so I don't think it's getting a video stream from the cam, but that's already a great step forward. Thanks

Answer 2

There's an officially supported v4l2 camera module for the RPI camera (not the same as UV4L). It needs to be loaded, so that may be your problem:

$ sudo modprobe bcm2835-v4l2

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=62364

Answer 3

Apart from what others said, UV4L also provides an HTTP WebServer module from which you can get the media stream (video + audio) via WebRTC too to your browser. At the moment audio seems to be work-in-progress.