01590c3f78
The qcam application installs a custom event dispatcher based on the Qt event loop. As the camera manager now creates an internal thread, it doesn't use that event dispatcher of the application thread at all. Furthermore, the custom event dispatcher is buggy, as it doesn't dispatch messages posted to the main thread's event loop. This isn't an issue as no messages are posted there in the first place, but would cause incorrect behaviour if we were to use that feature (for instance to deliver signals from the camera manager thread to the application thread). Fixing the event dispatcher requires a change in the libcamera public API, as there's currently no way to dispatch messages using the public API (Thread::dispatchMessages() is not exposed). This isn't worth it at the moment, so just remove the custom event dispatcher. If qcam later needs the libcamera request and buffer completion signals to be delivered in the application thread, it will need to handle that internally, using Qt's cross-thread signal delivery. Signed-off-by: Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> Reviewed-by: Kieran Bingham <kieran.bingham@ideasonboard.com>
.. section-begin-libcamera
===========
libcamera
===========
**A complex camera support library for Linux, Android, and ChromeOS**
Cameras are complex devices that need heavy hardware image processing
operations. Control of the processing is based on advanced algorithms that must
run on a programmable processor. This has traditionally been implemented in a
dedicated MCU in the camera, but in embedded devices algorithms have been moved
to the main CPU to save cost. Blurring the boundary between camera devices and
Linux often left the user with no other option than a vendor-specific
closed-source solution.
To address this problem the Linux media community has very recently started
collaboration with the industry to develop a camera stack that will be
open-source-friendly while still protecting vendor core IP. libcamera was born
out of that collaboration and will offer modern camera support to Linux-based
systems, including traditional Linux distributions, ChromeOS and Android.
.. section-end-libcamera
.. section-begin-getting-started
Getting Started
---------------
To fetch the sources, build and install:
::
git clone git://linuxtv.org/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}
for libcamera: [required]
meson (>= 0.47) ninja-build python3-yaml
If your distribution doesn't provide a recent enough version of meson,
you can install or upgrade it using pip3.
.. code::
pip3 install --user meson
pip3 install --user --upgrade meson
for device hotplug enumeration: [optional]
pkg-config libudev-dev
for qcam: [optional]
qtbase5-dev libqt5core5a libqt5gui5 libqt5widgets5
for documentation: [optional]
python3-sphinx doxygen
for gstreamer: [optional]
libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev
Using GStreamer plugin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To use GStreamer plugin from source tree, set the following environment so that
GStreamer can find it.
export GST_PLUGIN_PATH=$(pwd)/build/src/gstreamer
The debugging tool `gst-launch-1.0` can be used to construct and pipeline and test
it. The following pipeline will stream from the camera named "Camera 1" onto the
default video display element on your system.
.. code::
gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc camera-name="Camera 1" ! videoconvert ! autovideosink
.. section-end-getting-started