/dev/video0 : invalid argument

Question

Why I am not able to read this file. I tried reading this file with cat as :

cat /dev/video0 

But it says

cat: /dev/video0 : invalid arguments

Similarly, if I try to use dd as :

dd if=/dev/video0 ~/vid

It still is not able to read it.

Note that video0 is the device file for my webcam.

Answer 1

In such cases, one way to find out more is to run the command in strace

strace cat /dev/video0

which will show more details of the point of failure:

....
open("/dev/video0", O_RDONLY)           = 3
fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0660, st_rdev=makedev(81, 0), ...}) = 0
fadvise64(3, 0, 0, POSIX_FADV_SEQUENTIAL) = 0
read(3, 0x2379000, 65536)               = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
....

which in my case seems to be saying that my /dev/video0 device does not support the required operation: so in this case, 'cat' is trying to read 64k bytes from the device.

However, I found that using nc (netcat) instead of cat did work for this purpose:

nc -l 1234 </dev/video0

With a corresponding:

nc 127.0.0.1 1234 | mplayer tv://device=/dev/stdin

to display locally; an SSH tunnel port would also work here.