Getting Started¶
To fetch the sources, build and install:
git clone https://git.libcamera.org/libcamera/libcamera.git
cd libcamera
meson build
ninja -C build install
Dependencies¶
The following Debian/Ubuntu packages are required for building libcamera. Other distributions may have differing package names:
- A C++ toolchain: [required]
- Either {g++, clang}
- Meson Build system: [required]
meson (>= 0.53) ninja-build pkg-config
meson (>= 0.55) is required for building Android (-Dandroid=enabled)
If your distribution doesn’t provide a recent enough version of meson, you can install or upgrade it using pip3.
pip3 install --user meson pip3 install --user --upgrade meson
- for the libcamera core: [required]
- python3-yaml python3-ply python3-jinja2
- for IPA module signing: [required]
- libgnutls28-dev openssl
- for improved debugging: [optional]
libdw-dev libunwind-dev
libdw and libunwind provide backtraces to help debugging assertion failures. Their functions overlap, libdw provides the most detailed information, and libunwind is not needed if both libdw and the glibc backtrace() function are available.
- for the Raspberry Pi IPA: [optional]
libboost-dev
- Support for Raspberry Pi can be disabled through the meson
- ‘pipelines’ option to avoid this dependency.
- for device hotplug enumeration: [optional]
- libudev-dev
- for documentation: [optional]
- python3-sphinx doxygen graphviz texlive-latex-extra
- for gstreamer: [optional]
- libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev
- for cam: [optional]
- libevent-dev
- for qcam: [optional]
- qtbase5-dev libqt5core5a libqt5gui5 libqt5widgets5 qttools5-dev-tools libtiff-dev
- for tracing with lttng: [optional]
- liblttng-ust-dev python3-jinja2 lttng-tools
- for android: [optional]
- libexif-dev libjpeg-dev libyaml-dev
- for lc-compliance: [optional]
- libevent-dev
Using GStreamer plugin¶
To use GStreamer plugin from source tree, set the following environment so that GStreamer can find it. This isn’t necessary when libcamera is installed.
export GST_PLUGIN_PATH=$(pwd)/build/src/gstreamer
The debugging tool gst-launch-1.0
can be used to construct a pipeline and
test it. The following pipeline will stream from the camera named “Camera 1”
onto the OpenGL accelerated display element on your system.
gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc camera-name="Camera 1" ! glimagesink
To show the first camera found you can omit the camera-name property, or you can list the cameras and their capabilities using:
gst-device-monitor-1.0 Video
This will also show the supported stream sizes which can be manually selected if desired with a pipeline such as:
gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc ! 'video/x-raw,width=1280,height=720' ! \
glimagesink
The libcamerasrc element has two log categories, named libcamera-provider (for
the video device provider) and libcamerasrc (for the operation of the camera).
All corresponding debug messages can be enabled by setting the GST_DEBUG
environment variable to libcamera*:7
.