Libobscura: A friendly library to use cameras on Linux

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@dcz announced libobscura, a new library for interfacing with cameras here: https://dorotac.eu/posts/libobscura/

For those that want to see the code, it is written primarily in Rust: https://codeberg.org/libobscura/libobscura

What does “friendly” mean?

  • It’s hard to use it wrong. No segfaults. Errors guide you to the right track.
  • Point-and-shoot. If that’s all you need, you get a RGB buffer in ten lines of code.
  • It’s easy to add support for new devices. Great documentation and a good internal API are the goals.
  • It’s easy to contribute to. Send patches using the web interface, not a mailing list.

## Status

Because libobscura is only two months old as a funded project, the current status is “proof of concept”.

[…]

But there are still goals to achieve:

[…]

Yes, Dorota also worked on libcamera, however, they are excited about libobscura being a better solution for everyone.

There is a lot more in the blog post so please give it a read!

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And it will be GPU-accelerated processing. :ok_hand: Sounds great, thanks for linking.

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Between Xmas and Silvester German hackers club “Chaos Computer Club” (CCC) is going to continue it’s traditional Chaos Communication Congress #38 (38C3).

This year @dcz is going to hold a talk about Linux camera APIs / stacks.

Usually the curated talks can be viewed via live stream or later the recordings can be found at

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I will definitely tune in or check the recording, been following the API progress for a while.

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I will be donating in January to help your efforts @dcz

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This reminds me that after new year’s were going to have to open a new thread for the next annual photography showcase (as we had a year ago).

So, anyone interested still has a week to get a publishable photo with L5 from this year!

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I love photography, so I can definitely get in on this!

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Video available:

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And, to be clear, this is @dcz (Dorota Czaplejewicz) who was a contract employee for Purism who worked on the Librem 5. I haven’t watched the video … but I am curious about the need for a separate library (libobscura) from libcamera.

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The first link in the first post of this thread is to a text oriented web page with a straightforward rationale.

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Gnu-on-mobile | Librem 5

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