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Webcam freezes after 30 seconds in all webcam using applications (Skype, guvcview, cheese, browser video chats, etc.). Can be restarted in Skype but freezes again with increasing frequency. Running from the terminal or doing "dmesg" shows the error: "Failed to resubmit video URB (-27)." Recently also had the "Could not grab image ... resource temporarily unavailable" error in guvcview.

This problem has persisted despite upgrades, (currently using 12.04, have tried every version since 10.04) different flavors of ubuntu (currently using lubuntu, but tried xubuntu and regular ubuntu with and without unity), and with different webcams (current logitech C270 webcam is listed on the UVC page as compatible, other webcams were supposed to be compatible with UVC as well).

My computer is a Dell Inspiron B130 with 1.8 GHz processor and 512mb RAM.

Thanks for your help!

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This appears to be a bug and should be filed as a bug report, and as such is off-topic, thanks! Instructions on filing a bug report are here. – Seth Apr 15 at 3:06

closed as off topic by Seth, Eric Carvalho, mateo, maggotbrain, Basharat Sial Apr 15 at 8:42

Questions on Ask Ubuntu are expected to relate to Ubuntu within the scope defined in the FAQ. Consider editing the question or leaving comments for improvement if you believe the question can be reworded to fit within the scope. Read more about closed questions here.

1 Answer

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I have a similar problem and it seems to be due with a conflicting flash-plugin in chrome. I filed a bug report here today:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/adobe-flashplugin/+bug/1046921

Feel free to add that it affects you too or if you have additional info on the problem.

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Thanks for the reply. I checked out the bug report but I'm not sure it's the same problem. I use chromium instead of chrome, I don't experience the blinking, and I almost never have a web browser and webcam-using applications open at the same time. At any rate I wasn't able to find or disable that plugin on chromium, so I couldn't check if that fix works. One interesting thing I've found is that the same webcams work fine on my Mac iBook G3 running powerPC lubuntu 12.04. Of course there's no Skype available for powerPC Ubuntu, so I'm still desperately hoping for a solution. – Sam Sep 9 '12 at 8:27
This bug report seems to be related. Apparently replacing the USB ports with USB 3.0 capable hardware works. I haven't tried ilthis yet, however. bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=746914 – Sam Sep 11 '12 at 5:47
This temporarily worked with an expresscard USB 3.0 card, however the last Linux kernel update broke support for the card, so now I'm back where I started. – Sam Nov 25 '12 at 23:02

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