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I have a Logitech C270 webcam that I use for video meetings that has been giving me issues for the past 6 months or so. It was working fine on Mint 18.1 for well over a year. After upgrading to Ubuntu 19.10 I would lose all other USB inputs if I was using the webcam long enough (3-4 minutes-ish) which would require un-plugging and re-plugging in my mouse/keyboard and lather rinse repeat the longer the call goes on. Since upgrading to 20.04, my other USB inputs work just fine but the microphone drops out and is unusable after a few minutes.

I've tried changing the input device in Ubuntu settings to something else and back again, but it doesn't show any input levels. I've tried changing the device in each application (Slack, Google Meet, Zoom; both native apps and via Chrome) individually from the mic to something else and back, also to no avail.

I've tried fiddling with PulseAudio Volume Control when it drops off, but that also shows no input levels during times of unavailability.

Once I drop off a call, the mic becomes available again with no problems; at least until the next call.

Does anyone have any ideas? Or at least some commands to run to catch some error output that could help diagnose the problem?

EDIT

I ran dmesg -w to trace output while on a call and here's the output from that:

<start of conference call>
[75333.606300] usb 10-1: reset high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[75333.845430] restoring control 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000101/10/5
[75333.845431] restoring control 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000101/12/11
[75341.476097] retire_capture_urb: 88 callbacks suppressed
<mic is muted by the meeting and I un-mute>
[75344.902731] usb 10-1: reset high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[75345.145656] restoring control 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000101/10/5
[75345.145659] restoring control 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000101/12/11
[75400.557603] retire_capture_urb: 18 callbacks suppressed
[75405.677617] retire_capture_urb: 40 callbacks suppressed
[75465.023044] retire_capture_urb: 118 callbacks suppressed
[75470.027072] retire_capture_urb: 104 callbacks suppressed
[75528.928529] retire_capture_urb: 138 callbacks suppressed
[75534.036554] retire_capture_urb: 28 callbacks suppressed
[75596.370087] retire_capture_urb: 225 callbacks suppressed
[75601.418081] retire_capture_urb: 253 callbacks suppressed
[75661.591545] retire_capture_urb: 114 callbacks suppressed
[75666.723638] retire_capture_urb: 98 callbacks suppressed
[75726.349060] retire_capture_urb: 8 callbacks suppressed
<point where mic input dies, nothing else happens>

<opening a fresh meeting and the mic works fine>
[76186.001715] usb 10-1: reset high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[76186.240445] restoring control 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000101/10/5
[76186.240446] restoring control 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000101/12/11
[76198.195739] retire_capture_urb: 22 callbacks suppressed
[76203.239794] retire_capture_urb: 50 callbacks suppressed

each of the retire_capture_urb entries aligns to points where I stopped talking during the meeting. I'm hoping this fresh info helps.

1 Answer 1

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SO. After looking into some issues other people were having with USB A/V inputs and seeing that a lot of it was dependent on which USB ports (and types of ports) were involved I decided to experiment.

  • When I was having issues with the microphone, the webcam was plugged into a USB 3.0 port.
  • When I moved the webcam to a USB 2.0 port after seeing that it didn't need 3.0, I lost the other USB peripherals (keyboard/mouse) that were plugged into the neighboring ports.
  • When I moved the other peripherals to a different group of ports, everything is magically working as it should.

In case anyone finds this and is wondering how it was fixed: the port shuffle was a suitable workaround; the problem of fixing the disabling of components was not actually resolved.

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