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.