# Make Logitech, Inc. Webcam c270 work again! ## Preface Some years ago I took a webcam from my mum as it didn't seem to work on her WindowsPC anymore - the **Logitech c270**. Since I didn't have such an HD cam until then I decided to give it a try on my Linux desktops. Guess what? It worked fine. And ended in my cupboard. As _Covid-19_ pandemia struck western societies early in 2020 the sudden need of video conference hardware urged me to fetch it from there again. ## White screen of death When I tested it with [VLC player](https://www.videolan.org/) it worked like a charm. When I used it for WebRTC applications instead there turned up certain flaws: The stream was disturbed by greenish lines progressively ending in a completely white screen. No plugging out and in, no fiddeling on cmd-line, nothing fixed this at all. Eventually the white screen vanished and the picture re-emerged! After about 5 minutes. I could have coped with this until a new cam would be purchasable after crisis. But the the 5 min lag grew over the weeks. And in the end the white screen even reoccured after some 15 minutes. I started searching the internet. Found nothing but driver un- and reinstallation of drivers with Windows10 and traces of video tutorials about soldering the cam's circuit board. That all seemed a step too far and I remembered the VLC player working ... ## A "better than nothing" fix To spoiler it: __I could not repair the device to "as good as new"__. But I can use it now as sufficient webcam for conferencing without white or black screens again. Starting the cam in VLC once more I checked its resolution there. And found that it used quite an **unusual resolution** of sth like 756x417 or alike. That made me curious what resolution e.g. [OBS](https://obsproject.com) used by default with this cam. Yes - 1280x720! I selected another resolution ... Still white screen. Another one - but again no improvement. So I selected the strange one I found in VLC and ... **Immediately the cam worked!** **Long story short:** This unusual resolution is now _the only(!) one_ that works without white screen. But it does. And that's enough for my purpose.