Limited camera resolution on Raspberry Pi 4 with VL805 firmware 0x000137ab

[DamianSepczuk]

What were you doing?

Trying to watch the webcam stream on Raspberry Pi 4 with VL805 firmware 0x000137ab. Webcam: "ID 1871:0141 Aveo Technology Corp. Camera" It worked before. Now it doesn't work (I can see only "webcam stream loading") (for a possible solution see below)

What did you expect to happen?

Webcam stream displayed.

What happened instead?

No webcam stream displayed. I can see only "webcam stream loading"

Did the same happen when running OctoPrint in safe mode?

yes

Version of OctoPi

OctoPrint 1.3.12 running on OctoPi 0.17.0

Printer model & used firmware incl. version

n/a

Screenshot(s)/video(s) showing the problem:

n/a

Investigation

The problem seems to be connected to a bug in 0x000137ab firmware of VL805.

First enable uvcvideo debugging and show the log:

echo 0xffff > /sys/module/uvcvideo/parameters/trace
dmesg -w

Streaming very low resolutions seems to work fine:

./mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w ./www-octopi -n" -i "input_uvc.so -y -r QVGA -d /dev/video0"

But trying to stream even in 640x480 (VGA) doesn't work:

./mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w ./www-octopi -n" -i "input_uvc.so -y -r VGA -d /dev/video0"

you can see a lot of uvcvideo: USB isochronous frame lost (-18). lines in the dmesg logs and i: select() timeout in the mjpg_streamer's output.

Now run (as root):

setpci -s 01:00.0 0xD4.B=0x41

(see: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=244421 for details)

Problem solved, the stream works fine!

Possible solution

You have to run the setpci command after each boot, so I've modified /root/bin/webcamd to do it for me:

--- webcamd.orig        2019-12-22 22:42:23.812714213 +0100
+++ webcamd     2019-12-22 22:51:21.563037412 +0100
@@ -116,6 +116,33 @@
 function runMjpgStreamer {
     input=$1

+    # There are problems with 0x000137ab firmware on VL805.
+    # It seems to work fine on 0x00013701
+    # It may be upgraded someday... display a warning and do nothing (it may just work!)
+    echo "Checking for vl805..."
+    if [[ -f /usr/bin/vl805 ]]; then
+        VL805_VERSION=$(/usr/bin/vl805)
+        VL805_VERSION=${VL805_VERSION#*: }
+        echo " - version 0x${VL805_VERSION} detected"
+        case "$VL805_VERSION" in
+            00013701)
+                echo "    - nothing to be done. It shouldn't cause USB problems."
+                ;;
+            000137ab)
+                echo -e "    - \e[31mThis version is known to cause problems with USB cameras.\e[39m"
+                echo -e "      You may want to downgrade to 0x0013701."
+                echo -e "    - [FIXING] Trying the setpci -s 01:00.0 0xD4.B=0x41 hack to mitigate the issue"
+                echo -e "      It disables ASPM L1 on the VL805"
+                setpci -s 01:00.0 0xD4.B=0x41
+                ;;
+            *)
+                echo "   - unknown firmware version. Doing nothing."
+                ;;
+        esac
+    else
+        echo "  - It seems that you don't have VL805 (Raspberry Pi 4). There should be no problems with USB (a.k.a. select() timeout)"
+    fi
+
     pushd $MJPGSTREAMER_HOME > /dev/null 2>&1
         echo Running ./mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w $camera_http_webroot $camera_http_options" -i "$input"
         LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./mjpg_streamer -o "output_http.so -w $camera_http_webroot $camera_http_options" -i "$input" &

I'm not an expert on Linux. The real cause and/or solution may be completely different.

[guysoft]

Would love a PR if you have a fully drafted solution. It would make this go in faster.

[guysoft]

Fixed by #623

[looxonline]

You should also add FW version 000137a8. Just spent half a day struggling to figure it out only to find that I had that version out the box and it suffers from the same issue. In any case I'm using a PS3eye which does not support mjpg and has to encode on the fly so I changed over to ustreamer which uses 9% CPU instead of 35% with mjpg. Still suffered with the same issue though. PCIe fix works.