picam

picam is a Meson-based project for Raspberry Pi CSI / MIPI cameras. It ships camview, a Cheese-style tool for live preview, still capture, and timed video recording, built on GStreamer (libcamerasrc) and GTK 4.

The repository also builds a small shared library libpicam (src/lib.c) used as a project base.

Features (camview)

• Preview: graphical window (gtk4paintablesink). P saves a JPEG under your Pictures directory; Q quits.
• Still (headless): -s / --still — JPEG or PNG; optional resolution; autofocus settle delay.
• Video (headless): -d / --duration — H.264 in MP4, MOV, or MKV; hardware encoder preferred (v4l2h264enc on Pi when available).
• Dual CSI: -i / --device uses a 1-based index (2 = second camera). Camera paths are resolved via rpicam-hello --list-cameras or libcamera-hello --list-cameras, or set explicitly with --camera-name.

Quick examples

# Live preview (needs a display)
camview

# Second camera, preview
camview -i 2

# One JPEG, default name camview_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.jpg
camview -s

# PNG, explicit path, 1920x1080
camview -s -f png -o shot.png -r 1920x1080

# 15 seconds of MP4
camview -d 15s -o clip.mp4

# Quick test clip, MOV
camview -d 500ms -f mov -o short.mov

Repository layout

Path	Purpose
src/camview*.c, src/camview*.h	camview CLI and GStreamer glue
src/lib.c	Shared libpicam helpers
tests/*_test.c	Check-based tests (e.g. duration_test, lib_test)
debian/	Debian packaging
po/	gettext catalogs
meson.build	Build definition

Build dependencies

Debian / Raspberry Pi OS (typical):

sudo apt install meson ninja-build pkg-config gcc \
  libbas-c-dev \
  libglib2.0-dev libgtk-4-dev \
  libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev \
  check

Runtime (for the installed camview binary): GStreamer libcamera plugin, GTK 4 plugin (gstreamer1.0-gtk4), good/bad/base plugins, and libgtk-4-1. See debian/control for the exact package list. Listing multiple cameras is easier if rpicam-hello or libcamera-hello is installed (Recommends in packaging).

Configure and build

Project hints use an absolute build dir /build when you have it; otherwise any directory works:

meson setup build
ninja -C build

Tests

meson test -C build

Man page and shell completion

• Man: camview(1) is generated from camview.1.in at build time.
• Bash: install ships camview completion under share/bash-completion/completions/ (source camview.bash when developing).

i18n (gettext)

camview strings live under po/; POTFILES lists sources for extraction. The Meson gettext domain is picam.

Refresh the template and merge new/changed msgid entries into every *.po:

ninja -C build picam-pot picam-update-po
ninja -C build picam-gmo

Then fill in msgstr in each language (or use a PO editor). Validate with msgfmt -c po/<lang>.po.

Note: a CLI named poedit on some systems is a batch TSV applier (poedit --help), not the Poedit GUI and not a substitute for msgmerge. For template updates, use the ninja targets above.

LANGUAGE=zh_CN ./build/camview -h

Install / symlink helpers

meson install -C build
ninja -C build install-symlinks    # dev symlinks into configured prefix
ninja -C build uninstall-symlinks

Debian package

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc

Troubleshooting

• GST_DEBUG: e.g. GST_DEBUG=libcamera:4 camview -s -o test.jpg for pipeline issues.
• No frame / timeout: still capture waits for PLAYING, AF settle, then up to 30s for a frame; ensure no other process holds the camera.
• Encoder: on non-Pi dev machines you may get x264enc / openh264enc instead of v4l2h264enc.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 Lenik picam@bodz.net

Licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later. This project explicitly opposes AI exploitation and AI hegemony, and rejects mindless MIT-style licensing and politically naive BSD-style licensing. See LICENSE for the full text and supplemental terms.