only one webcam works in OBS when they are plugged into a USB3 hub

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rdhoore108

New Member
I have four identical webcams, Ankerworks PowerConf C200. When I plug them straight into my laptop (3 USB ports are working, 1 is giving trouble), they work fine. When I plug them into a powered USB3 hub, they are all detected by Windows, they all work in the Windows camera app (one by one, this app only allows one camera active at a time), but in OBS, only one works, even though it lists all four of them. The others remain black. When I try to activate one of the non working ones, its light blinks twice but the image remains black and nothing else happens.

The drivers of my Dell Precison M3800 laptop are up to date, the firmware of the webcams as well, and this is the latest version of OBS.

I would be most grateful if anyone would be able to help troubleshoot this. I will really need 4 webcams working simultaneously next week. Thank you!

https://obsproject.com/logs/oEjcA8xbksWXIltT

== Ronny
 
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rdhoore108

New Member
R1CH said:
This is expected when sharing a single controller with many high bandwidth devices.

Managing USB bandwidth with USBView | r1ch.net

Find out how to make your USB devices perform optimally by moving them to less saturated controllers.
r1ch.net r1ch.net
Click to expand...

Thank you for the prompt reply, and of course this is true, but this is most likely not my problem, because they do work fine on active USB2 extenders, so they are USB2 webcams, and my hub is USB3, with a much higher bandwidth. It should be able to deal with all of them at the same time very easily. But it doesn´t even manage to activate two of them at the same time.

I tried three different USB3 hubs, on none of them, more than one webcam is willing to activate at the same time. Each webcam only takes 180 mA at most, and my USB hub is powered, so that is not the problem either.

The trouble seems to be that they are all identical webcams, the webcam LED blinking twice seems to indicate a communication problem. But exactly why there would be such a problem, I cannot figure out... If there would be a bandwidth problem, they would at least try to do their job, but there would be frame drops etc.

When i check the box "deactivate when not visible" then I can see all webcams one by one when I select a scene that involves only one webcam, but scenes which involve more than one webcam will only show one of them, the rest is black. Of course, I need them all active, otherwise they reinitialize the focus etc each time they get activated, and I won't be able to smoothly move from one scene to the next. But it's useful to know that OBS can in fact talk to all of them individually even when they are on the USB hub. I am aware that this smells like what you described as bandwidth problem, but really two webcams should at least be able to try to contend for bandwidth. But the fact that one activates, and the others simply blink their LED twice, seems to show a communication error...
 
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rdhoore108

New Member
One more thing I noticed is that when I select cameras one by one, their LED blinks once, and then lights up again, to remain on. When two cams need to activate simultaneously, both blink their LED once at the same time, then one of them blinks again and remains off. The other does as just described, and works fine.

When they are connected straight to the laptop, they don´t do this blinking once business, their LED lights up simultaneously and remains on.

For some strange reason, they simply behave differently when on a USB hub. I suppose I´ll have to contact the manufacturer about this.
 
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rdhoore108

New Member
By the way, one thing that I would really love to see is an option to automatically reconnect webcams that got deactived by any other method than deactivating manually or through the "deactivate when not visible" checkbox. I need all of them to be active simultaneously, so if one got unplugged accidentally or on purpose then an automatic reactivation on windows detection would be so very practical and impressive...

Now it only reactivates them when "deactivate when not visible" is checked and a scene involving different cameras is selected.
 
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rdhoore108

New Member
Lawrence_SoCal said:
vendor driver?
Click to expand...

Vendor of the webcams? They don't need a driver, they are fully windows webcam compatible... I did download their software to update the webcam firmware to the latest version.
Also the Dell drivers are up to date, and the Windows 10 updates as well. Of course it's not a very recent laptop. But I'm not a very wealthy person...

Anyhow, I wrote them an email, let's see what will happen.

But thanks very much for thinking along!
 
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R1CH

Forum Admin
Developer
rdhoore108 said:
Thank you for the prompt reply, and of course this is true, but this is most likely not my problem, because they do work fine on active USB2 extenders, so they are USB2 webcams, and my hub is USB3, with a much higher bandwidth. It should be able to deal with all of them at the same time very easily. But it doesn´t even manage to activate two of them at the same time.
Click to expand...
If the webcams are USB 2 the hub has no benefit by being USB 3, everything will still run at (and be limited by) USB 2 speeds.
 
R

rdhoore108

New Member
R1CH said:
If the webcams are USB 2 the hub has no benefit by being USB 3, everything will still run at (and be limited by) USB 2 speeds.
Click to expand...

Wow, I didn't know that, and I've worked in IT for 20 years... But indeed, apparently there is "not yet" any translation between USB 2 and USB 3, unlike between USB 1.1 and USB 2. They simply run on separate wires. Well, yes, that does explain a lot. Thank you so much. I will see if a lower resolution would make a difference, then.
 
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rdhoore108

New Member
It seems like we were both right. Even with resolutions of 640x360 instead of 2K, still the cameras show the exact same behavior when I connect two cameras to a USB hub. So I will need advice from Ankerworks, the manufacturer of the webcams, after all.
 
Grindhead Jim

Grindhead Jim

Member
rdhoore108 said:
It seems like we were both right. Even with resolutions of 640x360 instead of 2K, still the cameras show the exact same behavior when I connect two cameras to a USB hub. So I will need advice from Ankerworks, the manufacturer of the webcams, after all.
Click to expand...
You ever hear back from Anker? This is happening on my machine, now, and it's not only affecting the Anker cam. There's something about the way this camera is handled that is causing multicam issues, and it may not only be a USB controller issue.
 
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rdhoore108

New Member
Jim, they did reply with some degree of curiosity as to what could be the reason:

Ankerwork support <support@ankerwork.com> 28 apr 2023 10:03

Dear rdhoore,

Thanks for your email.

It is not a common issue, and would you mind telling us your hub version, so we can proceed with further analysis for you?

Thank you in advance for your kind understanding! Look forward to your reply, and wish you a pleasant day.

Reference TicketTNE104988790 if contacting a CSR
mattie
AnkerWork Customer Support
Click to expand...

However, as I had tried three different brands of hubs already before contacting them, and spent lots of time investigating, my solution was to give up on the laptop with only 3 USB ports, and instead use a desktop computer (with an i5 processor, nothing really special), order two cheap 4-port USB3 PCIe cards from China, and now it's working great. The 6 built-in USB ports on the PC can each have a PowerConf C200 webcam active at the same time, and each PCIe card can have two webcams active at the same time (plus 2 other things like keyboard, mouse, audio interfaces). So I can have a total of 10 webcams at 2K resolution active all at the same time (at least I think so, so far I've only used 6 at a time), which is very fine.

So, 2 webcams do work on the USB3 PCIe card simultaneously (a third one kind of works but misbehaves), but not on any powered USB3 hub. I'm still not sure why, but at this point I don't care.
 
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