I have a Dell XPS 9370, which is known to have only one camera. But ls /dev/video* results in /dev/video0 /dev/video1 /dev/video2 /dev/video3, so four different camera devices.
These four cameras bubble up to the applications, e.g. Skype which lists four cameras, but just the first one (/dev/video0) works.
Does anybody know where the other entries come from? Or how to hide them from higher layers?
Best Answer
The answer given here https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/512759/multiple-dev-video-for-one-physical-device is a good one. I have the same problem with Skype and it started when I upgraded the kernel from 4.4.x to 5.1.x so somewhere in there the uvcvideo module produced a different output. However, has it is pointed out the output of
does show that each entry has a different capability, and in the case of my logitech usb camera only 1 has video capture. So this is most likely a bug in Skype, that appeared after the kernel probably fix a bug themselves, that does not only shows the entries that have a "Video capture" capability.