Was I able to find documentation of the commands? Yes, doing v4l2-ctl --help-vidcap, which is documented in the man page. That probably should have just been another man page.

Was I able to change the pixelformat on my camera to MJPG? Yes, by doing v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --set-fmt-video=pixelformat=MJPG.

Does this make a difference when I do mpv /dev/video0 to check the video output? Nope! It gets set back to YUYV raw video at 5fps.

So I do actually need to figure out how to set the correct format in ffmpeg or whatever I use to stream to the loopback device?

#V4L2 #Video4Linux #V4L2loopack #WhereIsTheManual

Is there complete documentation of v4l2-ctl anywhere? Because the man page I got with the package isn't it.

I saw the --list-formats-ext option recommended to list all the available formats for a device, which works, but isn't documented. I'm guessing that I need a corresponding option to set the format I want, but I have no idea because the documentation isn't there.

#V4L2 #Video4Linux #WhereIsTheManual

I want to say this again and again: Random bits of information scattered like confetti all over social media and Discord chats does NOT count as documentation.

#WhereIsTheManual