Re: video(4) landed. "No webcam driver" is dead.

Hi Olivier,

You just found that your laptop has a camera for the Southern Hemisphere people. :)

Joking aside, video1 is most likely the IR camera used for facial recognition. That explains the 640x360 GREY stream, so the two video devices are expected.

If you point your phone camera to the webcam, and see it flickering, that the IR led doing a scan. Like the kinect camera.

The rotation is probably because some laptop camera modules are physically mounted upside down and rely on software to handle the orientation if needed. (the software vectorize the face in both position to authenticate, and pass if one of match)

We still need to decide what to do with the IR interfaces: expose them as separate video devices, or identify/hide them when they are not useful.

I'm going to get a Carbon by end of week to test it. (I have other laptops with IR, but they it not upside down)

Best,
Abdelkader


On Mon, 31 Aug 2026, at 16:22, Olivier Cochard-Labbé wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2026 at 11:41 PM Abdelkader Boudih <freebsd@seuros.com> wrote:
>> __
>> Where its been tested:
>>  • across basically the whole Apple fleet here : MacBooks, iMacs, Every one of those machines is now missing exactly one thing (WiFi, still catching up on some chipsets).
>>  • Also tested on regular Laptops with integrated webcams, which mostly just worked .
> Thanks a lot for your work Abdelkader,
> 
> tested on Lenovo Carbon.
> First it shows 2 devices (but there is only one webcam):
> 
> uvideo0 on uhub1
> uvideo0: <8SSC21K64613V1SR41F138L Integrated Camera, class 239/2, rev 2.01/10.18, addr 2> on usbus1
> uvideo0: 2 format(s), iface_index=1, endpoint=0x81, psize=2940, isoc
> uvideo0: default format: pixfmt=0x47504a4d, 1280x720, max_fbuf=4147200
> uvideo0: registered as /dev/video0
> uvideo1 on uhub1
> uvideo1: <8SSC21K64613V1SR41F138L Integrated Camera, class 239/2, rev 2.01/10.18, addr 2> on usbus1
> uvideo1: 1 format(s), iface_index=3, endpoint=0x82, psize=1300, isoc
> uvideo1: default format: pixfmt=0x59455247, 640x360, max_fbuf=230400
> uvideo1: registered as /dev/video1
> 
> Tested with videolan (opening the v4l2:///dev/videoX device):
> - The first video0 shows a full HD video but upside-down
> - The second video1 shows a smaller resolution video (640x360) from the same device, black and white, flickering, still upside-down
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Olivier