What is a camera?

Posted Oct 8, 2024 18:34 UTC (Tue) by laurent.pinchart (subscriber, #71290)
In reply to: What is a camera? by Sesse
Parent article: Coping with complex cameras

> Do you have any good recommendations—is it libcamera that one would want to use? (I'd rather not go to the level of FFmpeg or Gstreamer if I can avoid it; FFmpeg is a great codec library but pretty weak on anything involving live, and Gstreamer is just a world of pain)

It depends on your use cases. For desktop applications, the future is Pipewire, which itself will interface with libcamera (or for the time being directly with V4L2 for USB webcams). For more specific applications, especially in embedded and IoT use cases, I recommend GStreamer with the libcamerasrc element. On Android one would of course use the libcamera Android adaptation layer that implements the camera HAL3 API. Direct usage of the libcamera API isn't something I expect to see very commonly for generic-purpose applications.

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What is a camera?

Posted Oct 8, 2024 18:45 UTC (Tue) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link] (1 responses)

FWIW, my application is low-level enough to already talk to ALSA directly (both for PCM and for MIDI) and have its own userspace USB drivers for certain capture cards, so it sounds like libcamera directly would be the most likely avenue to try first. :-)

What is a camera?

Posted Oct 8, 2024 21:16 UTC (Tue) by laurent.pinchart (subscriber, #71290) [Link]

If you're dealing with systems that require controlling an ISP, libcamera would then be a good way forward. If you're dealing with UVC webcams, libcamera could still help but is probably overkill as it won't give you the features you mentioned were missing (such as transcoding between formats or decoding JPEG). If you're dealing with IP cameras, libcamera will definitely not help as we don't support those.