‘guvcview’ Captures images and Record Videos using your Webcam (Ubuntu)

‘Camorama’ is a lightweight application that you can use to capture images using your Webcam device. However, its limited functionality will disappoint some people (especially those who are addicted to ‘Cheese’ ;-)). So if you’re looking for another utility that has a lot of features but still doesn’t need a lot of system resources to run then you might wanna try ‘guvcview’.

It lets you capture images, record videos (including audio!), change color settings and add effects to images and videos. It used about 12-13MB while running but when recording videos it can go as high as 40-42MB, but that’s still less than ‘Cheese’ uses. Sure its its icons may not look so modern and ‘incredibly’ big, but it gets the job done.

You can change between the video & audio codecs used when recording (MJPEG-Compressed, YUY2, RGB, MPEG-1, FLV, WMV-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, PCM-uncompressed, MPEG, MP3, AC3, Faac etc), change the resolution, frame rate, bitrate, audio channels, supports AVI and MKV container formats, change between Webcam devices (if you have more than one) and even has few built in audio effects too (fuzz, echo, ducky etc).

It also lets you change a huge amount of video codecs related options but unless that you know what you’re doing, it’s better to leave those alone. When I opened it first and tried to take an image it crashed. But then I changed the image output from MJPEG (default) to (YUYV) and it solved the issue.

But you can still use ‘MJPEG’ as the output if you change the image format from ‘JPG’ to anything else (PNG for example).

Other than that, I didn’t have any issues with it and successfully recorded videos (you can manually disable audio input) and took pictures, added few funny effects … all is good with ‘guvcview’ :).

You can install it in Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal, 12.04 Precise Pangolin, 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, 11.04, 10.10 and 10.04 by using the below command in your Terminal.

sudo apt-get install guvcview

That’s it, enjoy!.