/dev/video0 now missing after working fine for months

[Mad Professor]

Good day all.

At the start of this week my ZM system stoped recording and shows the input in red.

If I remote access into the system and look at "/dev/" I can no longer see "/dev/video0".

I also have phpsysinfo install on this system and it still shows the following:

Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture.
Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture.

So I guess it's safe to say that the card is still being seen by the system.

I have not made any changes to the system hardware or software wise before I spoted the problem.

Can someone please advice me how to fix this problem.

Thanks for your time.

Best Regards.

[zoneminder]

Have you tried a reboot?

[Mad Professor]

I have tried both a soft and hard reboot.

[Mad Professor]

I have pulled the card out of the current system, and put it into a test system with a clean OS and Zoneminder, and the card is working fine.

Put the card back in the current system and still the same problem.

Can someone please help me debug this problem, as I don't really want to wipe the system and start again unless really needed.

Thanks for your time.

Best Regards.

[tijuca]

What about /var/log/{messages,syslog,dmesg}?
Any abnormalitys to see?

Can post this files on pastebin for example?

Do you have made changes to your udev rules? The access rights for the dev files are o.k.?

Can you put the card into a other slot?

[wkulecz]

What does ls /dev/vid* show?

I've had problems with udev changing the device mappings for hard drives and cameras.

Have you installed any "security updates" Its possible an updated driver now recognizes a built in webcam which now gets /dev/video0 moving your card to /dev/video1.

I had this happen on a notebook with a built in webcam, unfortunately the web cam doesn't seem to work with zm despite working fine with gstreamer v4l2src capture element.

[Mad Professor]

I have has a quick scan over the logs, and nothing jumps out at me.

running "ls /dev/vid*" comes back with "ls: cannot access /dev/vid*: No such file or directory"

[wkulecz]

There should be messages in dmesg about finding your video card after boot up. If they are not there that is the problem -- driver missing with new kernel? wrong module versions? Hard to tell what is wrong, but if the driver modules are not being loaded for your card it can't work.

If the driver modules get loaded look to something gone wrong with udev.

[Mad Professor]

I ended up doing a clean install of the OS, and eveything is now back up again running again.