Welcome to the GTK+ UVC Viewer home page.

Introduction.

This project aims at providing a simple GTK interface for capturing and viewing video from devices supported by the linux UVC driver, although it should also work with any v4l2 compatible device.

The project is based on luvcview for video rendering, but all controls are build using a GTK2 interface.

You can also use guvcview (since version 0.9.9) has a control window only, (from console: guvcview --control_only), this allows image control on other apps, like ekiga, cheese, mplayer, skype, ...

Audio.

Guvcview audio support is based on the portaudio library, up until version 0.9.3 the blocking API was used for audio capture, since version 0.9.4 the callback method is used instead, this provides better performance, it is also the preferred method for the portaudio API.

All interfaces (ALSA, OSD, JACK, ...) supported by portaudio should be available in guvcview. Just make sure portaudio was compiled with the desired interfaces enabled.

UVC Dynamic controls.

The linux UVC driver has an implementation for extension controls (these are vendor specific controls and are supported in the UVC spec.), they are called dynamic controls since they must be dynamically loaded into the driver.

Until today only logitech has supplied specs for their UVC webcam extension controls, these are supported by guvcview.

In new driver revisions admin rights are needed in order to add these controls to the driver, so there are basically two solutions:

1- start guvcview has root (sudo for debian/ubuntu) at least once per session, since version 1.2.0 you can do this with the option --add_ctrls avoiding the need to fully launch guvcview

2- install libwebcam this software has a udev script that should add the necessary controls to your logitech camera.