libcamera
A complex camera support library for Linux, Android, and ChromeOS
Cameras are complex devices that need heavy hardware image processing operations. Control of the processing is based on advanced algorithms that must run on a programmable processor. This has traditionally been implemented in a dedicated MCU in the camera, but in embedded devices algorithms have been moved to the main CPU to save cost. Blurring the boundary between camera devices and Linux often left the user with no other option than a vendor-specific closed-source solution.
To address this problem the Linux media community has very recently started collaboration with the industry to develop a camera stack that will be open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP. libcamera was born out of that collaboration and will offer modern camera support to Linux-based systems, including traditional Linux distributions, ChromeOS and Android.
Getting Started
To fetch the sources, build and install:
git clone https://git.libcamera.org/libcamera/libcamera.git cd libcamera meson setup build ninja -C build install
Dependencies
The following Debian/Ubuntu packages are required for building libcamera. Other distributions may have differing package names:
- A C++ toolchain: [required]
- Either {g++, clang}
- Meson Build system: [required]
meson (>= 0.56) ninja-build pkg-config
If your distribution doesn't provide a recent enough version of meson, you can install or upgrade it using pip3.
pip3 install --user meson pip3 install --user --upgrade meson
- for the libcamera core: [required]
- libyaml-dev python3-yaml python3-ply python3-jinja2
- for IPA module signing: [recommended]
Either libgnutls28-dev or libssl-dev, openssl
Without IPA module signing, all IPA modules will be isolated in a separate process. This adds an unnecessary extra overhead at runtime.
- for improved debugging: [optional]
libdw-dev libunwind-dev
libdw and libunwind provide backtraces to help debugging assertion failures. Their functions overlap, libdw provides the most detailed information, and libunwind is not needed if both libdw and the glibc backtrace() function are available.
- for device hotplug enumeration: [optional]
- libudev-dev
- for documentation: [optional]
- python3-sphinx doxygen graphviz texlive-latex-extra
- for gstreamer: [optional]
- libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev
- for cam: [optional]
libevent-dev is required to support cam, however the following optional dependencies bring more functionality to the cam test tool:
- libdrm-dev: Enables the KMS sink
- libjpeg-dev: Enables MJPEG on the SDL sink
- libsdl2-dev: Enables the SDL sink
- for qcam: [optional]
- qtbase5-dev libqt5core5a libqt5gui5 libqt5widgets5 qttools5-dev-tools libtiff-dev
- for tracing with lttng: [optional]
- liblttng-ust-dev python3-jinja2 lttng-tools
- for android: [optional]
- libexif-dev libjpeg-dev
- for lc-compliance: [optional]
- libevent-dev
Basic testing with cam utility
The cam utility can be used for basic testing. You can list the cameras
detected on the system with cam -l, and capture ten frames from the first
camera and save them to disk with cam -c 1 --capture=10 --file. See
cam -h for more information about the cam tool.
In case of problems, a detailed debug log can be obtained from libcamera by
setting the LIBCAMERA_LOG_LEVELS environment variable:
:~$ LIBCAMERA_LOG_LEVELS=*:DEBUG cam -l
Using GStreamer plugin
To use GStreamer plugin from source tree, set the following environment so that GStreamer can find it. This isn't necessary when libcamera is installed.
export GST_PLUGIN_PATH=$(pwd)/build/src/gstreamer
The debugging tool gst-launch-1.0 can be used to construct a pipeline and
test it. The following pipeline will stream from the camera named "Camera 1"
onto the OpenGL accelerated display element on your system.
gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc camera-name="Camera 1" ! glimagesink
To show the first camera found you can omit the camera-name property, or you can list the cameras and their capabilities using:
gst-device-monitor-1.0 Video
This will also show the supported stream sizes which can be manually selected if desired with a pipeline such as:
gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc ! 'video/x-raw,width=1280,height=720' ! \
glimagesink
The libcamerasrc element has two log categories, named libcamera-provider (for
the video device provider) and libcamerasrc (for the operation of the camera).
All corresponding debug messages can be enabled by setting the GST_DEBUG
environment variable to libcamera*:7.
Presently, to prevent element negotiation failures it is required to specify the colorimetry and framerate as part of your pipeline construction. For instance, to capture and encode as a JPEG stream and receive on another device the following example could be used as a starting point:
gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc ! \
video/x-raw,colorimetry=bt709,format=NV12,width=1280,height=720,framerate=30/1 ! \
jpegenc ! multipartmux ! \
tcpserversink host=0.0.0.0 port=5000
Which can be received on another device over the network with:
gst-launch-1.0 tcpclientsrc host=$DEVICE_IP port=5000 ! \
multipartdemux ! jpegdec ! autovideosink
Troubleshooting
Several users have reported issues with meson installation, crux of the issue is a potential version mismatch between the version that root uses, and the version that the normal user uses. On calling ninja -C build, it can't find the build.ninja module. This is a snippet of the error message.
ninja: Entering directory `build' ninja: error: loading 'build.ninja': No such file or directory
This can be solved in two ways:
- Don't install meson again if it is already installed system-wide.
2) If a version of meson which is different from the system-wide version is already installed, uninstall that meson using pip3, and install again without the --user argument.
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