News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Looking for a MacOS Hand Mirror alternative app for Ubuntu? Here’s one for the GNOME desktop.
It’s CamPeek, an extension adds an icon on GNOME top-bar, allowing to one-click to preview your webcam. It’s lightweight and fast! And, it streams your webcam feed directly without recording or saving any data.
image from app’s Github project page
GNOME introduced new core camera app in the release of version 45, which however not adopted as default in Ubuntu 23.10 or Fedora 39.
If you want to try it out, then here’s how to do the trick in Ubuntu 24.04 and/or Ubuntu 23.10, and workaround “No Camera Found” issue.
The new camera app, aka Gnome Snapshot, is written in GTK4 + Libadwaita. Compare to Cheese, it looks more modern and native in current Ubuntu and Fedora Workstation.
Image from gnome.org
Guvcview, the free open-source tool for capturing image/video and dynamically controlling UVC camera and webcam devices, released version 2.1.0.
It’s a GTK3 and Qt5 application that provides both graphical interface and command line options to control your webcam or camera.
With it, you can change the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, white balance (gamma), sharpness, backlight compensation, etc settings for your webcam.
Besides the dynamic control of UVC (USB Video Class) camera/webcam, it also allows to capture video with control of frame rate, filters such as mirror, invert, pieces, blur, etc. Also, capture audio with sample rate, latency, and filters including echo, reverb, fuzz, wahwah, and ducky.
Has a webcam connected in your Linux PC or laptop? Here’s a graphical tool to configure the camera exposure, white balance, brightness, contrast, power line frequency, gamma, etc.
It’s cameractrls, a new open-source tool that provides Python CLI and GUI (GTK, TK) to set the Camera controls in Linux. It can set the V4L2 controls and it is extendable with the non standard controls.
Currently, it has a Logitech extension (Led mode, led frequency), Kiyo Pro extension (HDR, HDR mode, FoV, AF mode, Save), Systemd extension (Save and restore controls with Systemd path+service).
Cheese and Cameractrls
As the picture shows, it has the slider bars to adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, and hue, which also configurable via the default Cheese app.
Basic settings page
There are as well options to switch between Aperture Priority Mode and Manual Mode to adjust camera exposure, backlight compensation, toggle HDR. White Balance temperature is also configurable in both auto and manual mode.
Advanced settings page lets you select power line frequency, toggle focus, AF mode, and adjust Pan, Tilt, Zoom, FoV if your web camera support them.
Cameractrls Advanced
This is a Python app that should work on all recent Linux distributions. To install it, open terminal from start menu (Ubuntu user may just press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard) and run the command below one by one:
1. Firstly, run command to install git in case you don’t have it:
sudo apt install git
The command is only for Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint based systems. Fedora user replace apt with dnf.
2. Grab the source by running command:
git clone https://github.com/soyersoyer/cameractrls.git
After downloaded the tool, run command to verify if it works for you!
./cameractrls/cameractrlsgtk.py
3. If the app launches and works, you may then run command in the same terminal window (close the app to continue) to install the app shortcut icon.
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin/ && mv cameractrls/ ~/.local/bin/
cd ~/.local/bin/
cd cameractrls desktop-file-install --dir="$HOME/.local/share/applications" \ --set-icon="$PWD/images/icon_256.png" \ --set-key=Exec --set-value="$PWD/cameractrlsgtk.py" \ --set-key=Path --set-value="$PWD" \ cameractrls.desktop
rm ~/.local/share/applications/cameractrls.desktop
And remove the source folder via command:
rm -rf ~/.local/bin/cameractrls
Guvcview is a video capture tool for cameras supported by the linux UVC driver, although it should also work with any v4l2 compatible device.
It provides:
You can also use guvcview as a control window only, (from console: guvcview –control_only), this allows image control on other apps, like ekiga, cheese, mplayer, skype, etc.
While Ubuntu 14.04 has Guvcview 1.7.1 in its repositories, the latest has reached Guvcview 1.7.3 with following changes:
Install Guvcview 1.7.3 in Ubuntu 14.04:
The official v1.7.3 packages from sf.net were built on Ubuntu 13.10 and they don’t work on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty due to dependencies problem.
I’ve rebuilt it into PPA based on Ubuntu 14.04, just download and double click to install it via Ubuntu Software Center.
Enjoy!
