For those with a common USB Video Class “UVC” web camera, it could soon finally see support under the DragonFlyBSD operating system.
While UVC web cameras have long worked well on Linux and various other BSDs and other open-source operating systems, it hasn’t been much of a priority for DragonFlyBSD. This BSD operating system though has been seeing work by developer Michael Neumann to port the UVC webcam driver from FreeBSD over to DragonFlyBSD. Additionally, it also ropes in some webcam patches carried by OpenBSD.
Michael Neumann shared in a mailing list post that progress is being made and at least being detected by the likes of the Chrome web browser, but it’s not yet functional:
“I just ported the UVC / webcam driver for FreeBSD to DragonFly. With some patches from OpenBSD, chrome recognizes my webcam, but it can’t record yet. Likely, because I commented out kqueue/polling support in the driver to make it build.
So that part is still missing. If anyone wants to fix this function before I do, it is uvc_v4l2_poll in bus/u4b/uvc/uvc_v4l2.c.
To test, google “webcam test” and continue. Or try:
ffmpeg -f v4l2 -i /dev/video0 -t 00:00:20 -vcodec libx264 record.mp4
As mentioned, it’s not yet working :)”
We’ll see if this UVC webcam driver gets all tidied up for DragonFlyBSD in 2025, more than a decade after other BSDs added their UVC drivers as well as the support on Linux and other operating systems.
