vikash-kothary / camset

GUI for v4l2-ctl

Camset

GUI for v4l2-ctl

Description
This is a tool for easy GUI adjustments of the Video4Linux (V4L) settings on Linux, using v4l2-ctl as backend. All controls are dynamically generated and the application should work with any V4L device, but has only been tested with webcams. The settings applied will remain active when using the webcam in other applications, for example Skype.

The example_ioctl folder contains some examples of direct ioctl calls for reading and setting V4L values (equivalent to v4l2-ctl --list-formats-ext, v4l2-ctl -L and v4l2-ctl -c), using the v4l2 Python bindnings library. The library has been slightly modified for compatibility with more recent Python versions (tested with 3.8.2) and is included.

Note
The application is WIP in early development, but in a functional state. Testing, issue reporting and suggestions are welcome. Do note that there are other applications that are similar and with more functionality (at least for now). This is just a small project to practice some Python.

Dependencies
Python 3
pip
v4l2-ctl
pkg-config

If running from source (not using the camset pip package) you will also need gi (PyGObject @ pip) and OpenCV (opencv-python @ pip)

Installation

For Ubuntu:

1. sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip v4l-utils pkg-config
2. pip3 install camset
   (If encountering problems with the cairo dependency, installing these additional packages should resolve it: sudo apt-get install libcairo2-dev libgirepository1.0-dev and then repeat step 2).

The pip install includes a .desktop file, which should be picked up by the desktop environment. If camset is not found you may need to set up your path environment, for example (open a terminal and write):
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin

or persistently:
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc

Note for LinuxBrew(HomeBrew) users:

Brew can sometimes take over ld and pkg-config binaries from system installed ones depending on what apps may have been installed via brew in the past.

See: Install fails on pycairo dependency

To fix this install the requried dependencies via brew (this will install a lot of things and take a very long time):
brew install cairo pkg-config pygobject3 gtk+3

Alternatively disable or remove brew components that provide or require pkg-config and ld and then follow the Ubuntu instructions from above.

Notes

Settings can be saved and loaded. If the "Autoload settings" button is checked, camset will look in ~/.config/camset for a settings file with the same name as the device (as suggested when saving settings) and load it when starting the application or when switching to that device.