Ubuntu – How make the Logitech Quickcam e3500 work

I had exactly the same problem and I have found a good workaround for it.

Suppose your webcam is in /dev/video0.

Please execute the following steps.

1. Install v4l2loopback by running

   sudo apt-get install v4l2loopback-dkms
   

2. Enable the v4l2loopback module by running

   sudo modprobe v4l2loopback
   

   This will install a virtual webcam, for example in /dev/video1

3. Finally, when you need your webcam on Skype, just run this command.

   ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -vsync 2 -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video1
   

This command redirects the real webcam in /dev/video0 to the virtual webcam /dev/video1 which should be recognized by Skype (it worked for me).

If you don't want to write the long ffmpeg command each time, you can save it into a script, say launch_skype_cam.sh defined below.

#!/bin/bash
ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -vsync 2 -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video1

Or you can set an alias, for example in your .bashrc file.

alias launch_skype_cam='ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -vsync 2 -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video1'   

The problem was the librealsense, that perform a patch on the uvc driver at installation. I just uninstalled the realsense packages, and it started working immediately.