Chrome / Chromium cannot see the camera

[copyleftdev]

Problem

Chrome, Brave, Electron apps (Slack, Discord desktop, Teams) don't list the Facecam in their camera selection.

Answer

Chromium-based browsers reject V4L2 devices that report both CAPTURE and OUTPUT capabilities. The Facecam also lacks MJPEG on older firmware, which Chromium requires for format negotiation.

Fix: Use the normalization daemon

The daemon captures from the physical camera and outputs to a v4l2loopback virtual camera with exclusive_caps=1 — which makes Chrome see it as a normal webcam.

# Load v4l2loopback
sudo modprobe v4l2loopback video_nr=10 card_label="Facecam Normalized" exclusive_caps=1

# Start daemon
sudo systemctl start facecam-daemon

Now select "Facecam Normalized" in Chrome's camera settings (chrome://settings/content/camera).

Important

• exclusive_caps=1 is mandatory — without it Chrome still won't see the device
• The daemon must be actively streaming before Chrome will detect it
• If you installed via .deb, the systemd service handles this automatically when the camera is plugged in

See App Compatibility for the full matrix.