Hello,

First of all: I can listen to music in all the players, by internal speakers or 
by headset headphones.

I bought a Creative Live HD VF 0790 usb webcam, which is advertised to work 
with Linux, and plugged it into a Thinkpad 410s.

According to dmesg, it is recognized by name and the kernel (v. 4.0.5) seems to 
use the uvc driver.

According to lspci, there are HDA Intel 5 Series / 3400 audio chipset and a 
'Mic' and 'Dock Mic' device on PCI.

I can also see a CX20585 'hdaudioC1D0' type 'speaker', which appears as audio 
device in the players. It appears as both output and mic device in audacity.

Somewhere i read i should make sure /dev/audio* gets created after i plug in 
the webcam. I can see a /dev/video0 appearing, but there is no /dev/audio*.

I can see the Live cam named correctly as a capture device in xfce4-mixer 
(using ALSA) , it is the only channel shown for this device, and i turned it to 
maximal. For the the HDA Intel device, i turned all capture / mic channels 
either off or to 100 or 50%, it does not make any difference with regard to the 
tested applications. 

After starting guvcview, i have the video working but there seems to be no 
audio input (capture). Although i don't even know exactly how to test this. 
Just 'captured' video sequences and played them in vlc - always no audio.

In guvcview, i can switch audio to the Live cam audio device. Then, the visible 
meter shows maximal (100%, red) input w/o me doing anything, and it does not 
respond to noise or voice. Still, saving a test stream, the result has no 
audio. Later on, after some reboot, it does not even show the noise thing, just 
dead silence.

The guvcview, audio controls button lets me choose the API:   No sound, 
portaudio, or pulseaudio. 
I did not install pulseaudio and would prefer to avoid it. Can't i use a webcam 
w/o pulseaudio ? Do i need jackd fpr 'portaudio' ? I installed jackd (version 
2) and started it with qjackctl but it does not seem to make a difference.

I tested some other other applications. In audacity, there is the 'Click to 
start monitoring' thing on the microphone meter. With internal mic, it works as 
expected, i can record my voice. With Live cam device (which is shown correctly 
and i can chose it as capture device) there are exactly 2 signals, depending on 
the XFCE4 alsamixer adjustment: With capture channel off, there is zero signal, 
with anything else, it's 100% (red) and just loud noise. As mentioned above, 
after some testing and reboot, all zero, not even the noise remained. I had to 
stop the testing at this point because i'm running out of time.
 
vlc does also not 'capture' audio, when it records a webcam sequence (the video 
is working but no sound).

Does 'cheese' indicate audio at all ? 

As a means of avoiding the problem in the first place, i plugged my headset 
into the laptop audio port (the small plug thing at the left side which has a 
headset symbol) and tried all these applications again. But i can't get any 
audio input, if anything then the internal / inbuilt mic is used. (It's easy to 
test, if you go away the audio signal faints accordingly)- I simply don't know 
how to say 'use the headset audio port'. 
With my old Thinkpad T61 the headset worked out of the box once plugged in. (No 
more here, can't compare anymore) 
In all the mentioned applications, i can't see any choice offered like 
'internal mic' or 'headset mic'. 

xfce-mixer has some IEC9something audio switches disabled, which i don't know 
about, but they made no difference.

To summarize, i have two problems:

1) The onboard mic is very low quality and i really want to get either the 
headset or the webcam microphone working. 

2) I do not know how to check, in a video chat application, the webcam audio 
input. Normally it would not send my own talk to the laptop output device, no ? 
Do i need to actually talk to someone ? But i would prefer to install skype 
only after i having the hardware running, in case this comes with its own 
trouble. But if you think i should debug this with skype, i'd give this a try.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


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