Webcam upside down when using skype

Question

When I use skype my video is upside down. But when I use Google hangouts or cheese it is fine. How do I fix this?

I have tried many things and nothing ever has worked. My laptop is a Asus K53E.

Solution 1

This is a link to a blog that appears to have solved the upside-down webcam issue on ubuntu 12.10.

First you need to make you have the libv4l-0 package installed.

To install libv4l-0 open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install libv4l-0

If your system is 64-bit then you should specify the i386 architecture, as this is what seems to work with Skype:

sudo apt-get install libv4l-0:i386

Step 2 is to edit skype.desktop so you can pre-load libv4l-0 with skype so type in terminal: sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/skype.desktop

In this file find Exec=skype and replace it with with Exec=env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

Solution 2

On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, this fix does not work with my Asus PC. The output of above command is:

$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype
ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.

Eventually, I got the command working from the README.doc in /usr/share/doc It was:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l2convert.so skype

With an installation of the package:

sudo apt-get install libv4l-0:i386

Happy :-)

Comments

[MadMike]

You really shouldn't ask question within answers. Please delete those parts and only keep the things that help other users to resolve the same problem.

[Tamer Shlash]

If your system is 64-bit you should sudo apt-get install libv4l-0:i386 instead.

[Andres]

For my 64bit 14.04 machine what worked was Exec=env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype %U The original line looked like Exec=env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 skype %U . Now the problem is that Webrtc tools for me show upside down: so definately a problem with drivers, not skype. So this should be taken as a patch not a fix.

[G. Demecki]

Since, the Skype version 8 and above is basically a web app, the trick with libv4l will no longer work. I've lost many hours to just find out it's not possible now. So my solution was extremely straightforward: I've just bought an external web camera... and it works flawlessly. Moreover: I finally realized built-in camera in Asus K-series was extremely low quality. The external one is sooo much better.