If you plug the world’s best-reviewed webcams into the Nintendo Switch 2 today, they won’t work, while many comparatively ancient webcams do. Why? That’s been a mystery for the nearly three weeks since the handheld launched. Now, two companies say they’ve figured it out and are pledging to update the firmware on their cameras.
Here’s a possibly oversimplified answer: today’s more powerful webcams advertise many different modes that they support to any device you connect via USB — but that’s a problem because the Nintendo Switch 2 appears to be choosing modes it can’t properly play.
In the case of Elgato, which will update its non-working Facecam MK.2 and Facecam Neo, the solve was adding an additional low-resolution 480p mode, with Elgato general manager Julian Fest speculating that the Switch can only reliably support “very low resolution” cameras in order to put multiple facecams on screen.
But low resolution by itself isn’t the answer — as you’d probably expect, given that Nintendo’s own official Switch 2 camera is a 1080p camera that genuinely broadcasts a 1080p mode (we checked), and given it’s far from the only 1080p or higher camera that works with Nintendo’s new Switch.
Accessory company Ugreen tells The Verge that the technical details of making a camera work with the console are far more nuanced than resolution, or frame rate, or whether you have the enhanced bandwidth of USB 3 or the far slower USB 2.
Nor is it enough for the camera to support a single compatible UVC (USB Video Class) mode. Instead, Ugreen spokesperson Gabrielle Wang explains by email, the camera needs to avoid advertising modes or protocols that the Switch might not recognize, or that it might attempt to use but fail, after you plug it into the console.
Ugreen says three different conditions all simultaneously need to be met for a camera to work with the Switch 2:
- “The camera must not use the HID protocol.”
- “The camera must be configured for Isochronous transfer mode.” (As opposed to Bulk, which can be more resource intensive.)
- “The USB endpoint descriptors must not include unsupported low frame rate settings (below 30 fps).” More on that one in a sec.
Unfortunately, you’re not likely to find any of those “specs” on a camera’s box or in its marketing materials, but but they are things you can check with a connected PC and a tool like USBView — and in so doing, we can see the camera incompatibility situation is more nuanced than a single factor.
Elgato’s Facecam MK.2, for instance, already advertises isochronous modes to connected devices as far as I can tell, and it doesn’t advertise an HID interface. In fact, it appears to already offer a 480p mode as well.
But Elgato’s camera may have broken Ugreen’s third theoretical rule — it tells connected devices like the Switch 2 that it’s capable of running as low as 5 fps at a variety of different resolutions, according to the USB Device Descriptors I’ve viewed. Ugreen says that the Switch 2 may prioritize lower settings, “but if the camera hardware cannot actually output at such low frame rates, it will cause a failure.”
It wouldn’t be surprising if Ugreen had an easier time figuring this out: though none of Elgato’s webcams worked with the Switch 2 at launch, Ugreen had the benefit of discovering that some of its models did, while others did not.
Ugreen says its CM826 / 55512, CM797 / 45644, and CM825 / 75330 cameras will have updates by the end of June, while the CM678 / 15728, CM778 / 35626, CM717 / 25442, CM825 / 55721, and CM831 / 65381 already work.
But I wonder if this should solely be the responsibility of camera companies — PCs, for example, don’t generally have this same trouble picking from a webcam’s list of supported video modes. Perhaps Nintendo will address the webcam compatibility situation, globally, with an update of its own.
Nintendo didn’t have a comment for our story.
Andrew Liszewski and Andru Marino contributed to this story.
