Logitech C920 and C922 webcams no longer provide native H.264 video streams

I’ve been bashing my head against the wall trying to get my brand new Logitech C920 to stream H.264 video, when all it wants to do is use MJPEG. I use it on my Octoprint server to stream RTMP video to a local server (and then onto Twitch), and transcoding is not really an option when you’re also trying to do a 3D print!

On a whim I detached my old C920 from my computer and plugged that in — and that did provide native H.264 video. So, what’s going on?

My old camera (with USB ID 046d:082d) works flawlessly. However, the hardware of the newer camera appears to have been updated, and has been given a new USB ID (046d:0892). Some people on the net implied that there might be H.264 frames attached to MJPEG frames as APP data, but after inspecting the stream, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I got in touch with Logitech support, who eventually had this to say:

Thank you for writing to Logitech Customer Care, my name is <redacted>.

I would like to inform you that the H.264 encoding was removed from the C920/C922 on models released in late 2018. While older units will have H.264 encoding in the device, the newer ones will not.

I’ve asked them for more clarity on the decision, but that seems pretty terminal to me.