problems with more than one camera attached

[AndySchroder]

I have some problems with more than one camera attached. I'm using ubuntu 22.04.

First: Why might one have more than one camera? Let's say you want to use a wired USB camera instead of a camera built into the screen of your laptop. You can't disconnect the laptop's built in camera without taking the laptop apart. Also, some laptops now have an infrared mode, so the one USB camera actually appears as two, an infrared camera and a non-infrared camera. In this case you have 2 cameras built in that you cannot easily disconnect.

The first problem I'm having is that sparrow wallet only shows a maximum of two cameras. So, the scenario I described above where a laptop has an infrared and non-infrared camera device presented to the operating system, I can't use a (third) wired USB camera at all. I've also tested this by plugging 3 wired USB cameras into a computer that is not a laptop and has no built in camera. In this scenario it also only shows the first 2 cameras, the third camera does not come up (in this test I had 1 of one model and 2 of another model, so not sure if that makes a difference).

Some other problems that are random but not always repeatable:

• Need to restart sparrow wallet to get a newly plugged in USB camera to be detected
• Sparrow takes a long time to select a second camera, frame rate is very slow, application hangs.

[AndySchroder]

Also, for the computer that has the second infrared mode, "sometimes" sparrow wallet does not see that second infrared camera and "sometimes" it does. However, other applications like Cheese and VLC can always use the infrared camera.