Improve default resolution for a Logitech C920 webcam?

[Christian Kreibich]

Hi there,

I'm using a Logitech C920 webcam and wonder whether I can convince the
applications using the camera (particularly Google Hangouts) to use a
better resolution than the fairly horrible 640x480 I'm currently stuck
with. I can easily get higher-resolution video off this camera using e.g.

  gst-launch-1.0 -v -e v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! queue \
     ! video/x-h264,width=800,height=448,framerate=30/1 ! h264parse \
     ! avdec_h264 ! xvimagesink sync=false

I don't know much about gstreamer but from some digging it looks like on
my Fedora 20 box Google's talkplugin uses gstreamer-0.10. I've managed
to build libgstuvch264.so from the 0.10 git branch and add it to my
installation, as I read that it adds support for H.264. However, this
alone seems to make no difference -- the resolution is still crap.

Is there anything else I can do here, or do I need to wait until the
webcam-using applications bump up to gstreamer 1.0?

Thanks,
-C.