9.22: Libcamera

Command Line Acces to Camera

With the advent of the Bookworm Pi OS the libcamera application was renamed to rpicam.  Right now libcamera commands will still work, but the will be deprecated and so it is best to code forward with rpicam commands.  We will predominantly work with two image encoders, jpeg for still images and h.264 for video.

The following material relates to the Bullseye operating system and uses libcamera.  If you are using Buster or wish to use the Raspicam legacy interface, go to section 1.3.7 of the 2020 class.  The following video and this article from Core Electronics , How to use of Raspberry Pi Cameras with Bulleseye OS Update are a good place to start.

Video 

For a complete overview of the librecamera go to Raspberry Pi Camera Software Documentation

Libcamera

Preview

libcamera-hello - gives a 5 second view of what the camera sees

libcamera-hello

To flip vertically or horizontally use the following switches

--vflip
--hflip

to find options use the help switch

libcamera-jpeg -h

To run the camera for a time in milliseconds, use -t followed by the time in milliseconds

libcamera-hello -t 8000
libcamera-hello --vflip -t 8000

To run the camera indefinitely, until you terminate the command (<ctrl>c) or close the window, set the time to zero.

libcamera-hello -t 0

Still Picture

When you take a picture you need to define a path for where the picture will be stored. If you do not do that, it will be stored in whatever directory the command line is operating in. You should think about your project and where you want to keep images, and keep them in a folder that is within your user directory (/home/username/....).

The following code will give a 5 second preview and then save a file. NOTE: you need to set the path to a folder on your pi.  the -o stands for output (file)

libcamera-jpeg -o /home/user/path/test1.jpeg
libcamera-jpeg --vflip -o /home/user/path/test2.jpeg --vflip

To change the delay time use -t with time in milliseconds

libcamera-jpeg --vflip -o /home/user/path/test3.jpeg -t 100
libcamera-jpeg --vflip -o /home/user/path/test4.jpeg -t 100 --width 640 --height 480

Libcamera-still allows you to save in different formats through the equivalency switch (-e)

libcamera-still -e png -o /home/user/path//FirstPNGphoto.png

Video

Here you are making a 5 second video and storing it in the Videos directory.  the .h264 makes an mp4 video.  

 libcamera-vid -t 10000 -o /home/  /path/video.h264 --vflip

to find help options try the -h switch

libcamera-vid -h 

time lapse 

 libcamera-still --vflip -t 60000 -o test%d.jpg --timelapse 10000

 

ffmpeg -framerate 1 -i test%d.jpg -c:v libx264 -r 30 output.mp4

Note, you can not view the video over VNC viewer as it is too slow 

MotionEye

 

Using Python 3

https://github.com/motioneye-project/motioneye

 

Resources

 

• Raspberry Pi Documentation
•