v4l2 camera module now in Pygame SVN

My Google Summer of Code Project has finally grown up and flown out of my personal git repo to enter the Pygame SVN. All development will now occur there, though I will leave my git up for archival purposes.

The project is a module for Pygame to support v4l2 cameras. The impetus for this was to make the webcam on the OLPC XO usable without intimate knowledge of GStreamer, and to allow for some basic computer vision. The module does, however, support many camera pixelformats beyond those used on the XO, and is pretty flexible to adding new ones.

At the moment, there is no support for v4l cameras beyond detecting that they are attached to the computer, and there is no support at all for Windows or OS X. René Dudfield is starting work on Windows support using directshow. OS X support will come eventually.

The API documentation for the module is pretty thorough, but I haven’t uploaded any tutorials or example scripts yet. For now, you can look at some of the scripts I’ve posted on this blog.

No Comments on v4l2 camera module now in Pygame SVN

Pygame Webcam Support

Update: Grab the up to date code in Pygame >1.9.1 from the Pygame repository.

There was a three day weekend here, so I got some real coding done on my GSoC project.

You can pull the code I’m working on from my repository at http://git.n0r.org/?p=pygame-nrp;a=summary

It is currently barely alpha quality, but it supports v4l2 cameras that use MMAP and YUYV or RGB24 pixelformats. That means it’ll work on the OLPC XO, though you’ll need to install gcc, SDL-devel, and probably some other stuff to compile it.

You can open a camera with:
cam = camera.Camera(device, (width, height))
Device in most cases is going to be "/dev/video0". (width, height) will probably be (640, 480).
You then need to start the camera with cam.start().
cam.get_image() will return an RGB Surface.
cam.close() closes the camera if necessary.

6 Comments on Pygame Webcam Support