I encountered a bit of trouble using an old Creative Webcam 3 USB with a website that wanted to capture video from it. This camera uses an OmniVision OV511+ controller and had never been any trouble to use even with Linux. However, attempting to use it via the browser produced a message that access to the camera was denied.
The first thing to check was permissions on the /dev/video0 device. I found that the user was not in the video group that was required to access the device by default. However, granting this permission and restarting the login session was still not enough.
It turns out that a characteristic of the USB Video Class (UVC) standard is that only video frames with certain pixel encodings can be generated by compliant devices. Whether due to this narrow scope or for other reasons, the WebRTC standard, which provides access to cameras via HTML5-compliant web browsers, only incorporated support for a relatively small number of pixel encodings, and browsers using the WebRTC library therefore only implement support for, at most, that subset of possible pixel encodings.
For example, Chrome (and any other browser which uses the WebRTC library) only supports decoding just a handful of the dozens of raw pixel formats, many vendor-specific, that are supported by the Video4Linux2 API.
Unfortunately, one of those vendor-specific pixel formats that is not supported by the WebRTC layer is the O511 pixel format generated by the OV511+ chip in the Creative Webcam 3 USB. This can be confirmed like so:
$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 010: ID 05a9:a511 OmniVision Technologies, Inc. OV511+ Webcam
$ v4l2-ctl --all -d /dev/video0
[..]
Format Video Capture:
Width/Height : 640/480
Pixel Format : 'O511'Okay, so what can be done? Fortunately, V4L2 developers provided a compatibility wrapper that will convert frames from esoteric pixel formats on-the-fly to the much more widely supported BGR42/YUV420 pixel formats. The wrapper is loaded using LD_PRELOAD before the browser is launched, e.g:
$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so firefox
$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l2convert.so chromium-browserIf your distribution is multiarch, the library will be under /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu or similar.