Programming the camera

This page explores how to interact with the laptop's built-in video camera.

Getting started

First, let's see the quickest way we can capture a still image from the camera--using a GStreamer command-line tool:

 gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! ffmpegcolorspace ! pngenc ! filesink location=foo.png

You'll need to run the above command in either a terminal in the developer console or one of the virtual terminals (e.g. ctrl-alt-f1). Note this means you don't need the Sugar GUI to be running to access the camera.

Camera

• Have to script v4l2 via gstreamer to capture a single frame from the camera. See sugar/shell/intro/glive.py for sample code
• Try this from the command line: gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! ffmpegcolorspace ! pngenc ! filesink location=foo.png

Camera-as-video-camera (v4l2?)

• Is a regular v4l2 device available via gstreamer (gst module)
• Try this from a terminal in the developer console: gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! ximagesink (The image will appear behind the developer console window so you'll need to move the window aside.)