Question / Help Missing Webcam settings for OBS (Linux)

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Dear Community,

actually I have trouble getting up and running a Webcam (C920 in this case) with a good result on OBS Studio on Linux. For some reason obs provides just a few, not so desireable options in the camera settings. The result is either slow video with low framerate or high CPU usage due to mssing h.264 support .guvcview has a lot more options to choose. While using guvcview the camera picture looks nice and the CPU load is very low. Ho can I fix this?

I'll also attach a view Screenshots of the settings.

GUVCVIEW - Settings - Video Controls


GUVCVIEW - Settings - Video Controls - Camera Output


GUVCVIEW - Settings - Image Control


GUVCVIEW - Settings - h.264 Control


OBS Webcam Settings -


OBS Webcam Settings - Camera Output Format

 

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

So what I do right now is using either mplayer or the preview of guvcview to get a lag-free webcam image. Using the implemented webcam feature in OBS under Linux will break your recording setup since the system load is way to high.

Another idea could be to use a dedicaded Linux Desktop with a capture card to record the content and add the camera. I'd like to avoid that for conrol reasons: It's more easy to use just one PC to switch scenes and arrange streaming and recording.

 

[elijahlynn]

I am also not seeing any advanced webcam settings on Linux OBS Studio - 22.0.2 (linux). Took me a while to figure out there should be settings there. The webcam is limited to 5fps @ 1920x1080 (Logitech c930e).

 

[Choseh]

don't want to be the resurrector of dead threads but in case anyone is wondering, the OP here should have changed the video format to one of the other available emulated ones to get higher fps

 

[Mejibyte]

I had the same issue on a Logitech C920 and I confirm that changing the Video Format field from "YUYV 4:2:2" to "BGR3 (Emulated)" fixed it for me. I now get a high frame rate and my CPU usage is around 4%.

For reference, it looks like under the scenes this field is just changing the "Pixel Format" field in v4l2. Here's a before and after:

mejibyte@amber:~$ v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --get-fmt-video
Format Video Capture:
Width/Height : 1920/1080
Pixel Format : 'YUYV' (YUYV 4:2:2)
Field : None
Bytes per Line : 3840
Size Image : 4147200
Colorspace : sRGB
Transfer Function : Default (maps to sRGB)
YCbCr/HSV Encoding: Default (maps to ITU-R 601)
Quantization : Default (maps to Limited Range)
Flags :


mejibyte@amber:~$ v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --get-fmt-video
Format Video Capture:
Width/Height : 1920/1080
Pixel Format : 'MJPG' (Motion-JPEG)
Field : None
Bytes per Line : 0
Size Image : 4147200
Colorspace : sRGB
Transfer Function : Default (maps to sRGB)
YCbCr/HSV Encoding: Default (maps to ITU-R 601)
Quantization : Default (maps to Full Range)
Flags :

 

[BareBonesTek]

Oh man, you have just about saved my life! I was about ready to throw my PC out the window :-)
Thank you.

 

[Dark_Ronius]

Just came here to thank you for this thread. I was determined to stream from my consoles under linux, and this allowed me to!