Jevois-daemon freezing after ~2 seconds

Question

I recently got my hands on two of your little cameras and I have to say they are quite excellent. I had no issues with Jevois-inventor on PC. However for the last few days I have had nonstop issues trying to get the SDK working on a virtualbox running on OSX.

Jevois-inventor as well as Jevois-daemon stream video for around 2 seconds and then freeze. They unfreeze roughly 4-6 seconds later to only freeze again within a second or less.

Background on my setup:

• Mac Mini 2012 Late 2.3 GHz with 8 GB of Ram (USB 3.0 on all ports)
• Virtualbox 6.1.2 r135662 with the corresponding extensions pack
• jevois-1.14.0-ubu1804.vdi precompiled image with SDK
• 2x JeVois-A33 Smart Cameras (bought within the last two weeks)
• Logitech C920 HD Webcam

Through extensive testing I have found the following configurations to work. The corresponding settings are found under as sub-points. All configurations have the filters set for both external cameras, as well as a virtualbox configured with 4 cores, 5.7 GB of RAM, and xHCI controllers enabled.

1. JeVois Camera in guvcview (No stuttering, working as dumb camera)
   1. Unselected under devices>USB
   2. Selected under devices>Webcam
   3. Running JeVois PassThrough module configured as YUYV 640 480 30.0 YUYV 640 480 30.0 JeVois PassThrough
2. Logitech C920 Webcam in guvcview (No stuttering, working as dumb camera)
   1. Unselected under devices>USB
   2. Selected under devices>Webcam
3. JeVois Camera in jevois-inventor (Stuttering/freezing, working as PassThrough dumb camera)
   1. Selected under devices>USB
   2. Running JeVois PassThrough module configured as YUYV 640 480 30.0 YUYV 640 480 30.0 JeVois PassThrough
   3. Camera must be unplugged and plugged back in once jevois-inventor is started in order to be found and begin streaming video in jevois-inventor
4. JeVois Camera in jevois-daemon (Stuttering/freezing, working as dumb camera)
   1. Selected under devices>USB
   2. Running JeVois PassThrough module on physical JeVois Camera configured as YUYV 640 480 30.0 YUYV 640 480 30.0 JeVois PassThrough
   3. Running JeVois PassThrough module on host-based jevois-daemon configured as YUYV 640 480 30.0 YUYV 640 480 30.0 JeVois PassThrough
5. Logitech C920 Webcam in jevois-daemon (Stuttering/freezing, working as dumb camera)
   1. Selected under devices>USB
   2. Running JeVois PassThrough module on host-based jevois-daemon configured as YUYV 640 480 30.0 YUYV 640 480 30.0 JeVois PassThrough

I have rebuilt and been running jevois-daemon through the SDK after rebuilding it with ~/jevois/rebuild-host.sh. The clean performance of the camera module and webcam on guvcview suggests that the problem is likely localized to my host hardware or my jevois software configuration.

Based on the behavior, it sounds like it could be a buffer issue as suggested in this thread. However, I have tested jevois-daemon with the --serout=None launch parameter and the freezing/stuttering continues. However, when stuttering occurs, the jevois-daemon console freezes up and does not respond to commands until the stream unfreezes.

I have no issues running these pass-through configurations on my windows PC running jevois-inventor.

Answer 1

Yes, we have seen similar things using virtual box on MacOS just recently.

Could you please try to shut down your virtual box completely (to make sure it releases the USB ports) and then get the native MacOS version of JeVois Inventor (or OBS Studio or Webcamoid) and see whether that works? In our testing it did work. So we concluded something was going on with virtual box, maybe the video drivers or such. We updated to the latest virtual box and latest extension pack and rebooted the host (yes, this is needed, even on Mac), and the problem was gone somehow...