Feb 25, 2016

Webcamoid 7.0.0 released

Finally, a new release of Webcamoid arrived! Let me show you what new features it has to offer, and what the future holds.

What's new


Device selection showing the available webcam controls
Device selection showing the available webcam controls

First at all i've removed unnecessary dependencies like QtGraphicalEffects that was not used, and QtMultimedia that doesn't fill the requirements of the project, it's missing a lot of valuable features and doesn't supports many formats for playback and recording, also it was not designed for low level frame access. Also replaced QAudioInput/Output that was very laggy, for PulseAudio in GNU/Linux, and XAudio2 in Windows.
Desktop capture
Desktop capture

In old releases when switching between effects, sometimes you may get a SEGFAULT, that is fixed in this release. Also, some effects were rewritten.
Applying effects in real-time to a video
Applying effects in real-time to a video

Recording options received a complete redesign. Now it list all video recording formats supported by the codec framework, will all possible codecs supported by each format, and you can control basic things like bitrate. You doesn't need to write a command or add a format manually like in previous releases.
Since some GNU/Linux distributions can't include FFmpeg in their repositories for legal reasons, i've added support for building Webcamoid with GStreamer instead of FFmpeg, GStreamer support is still EXPERIMENTAL and BUGGY, use FFmpeg whenever possible.
Support for all possible video formats and codecs
Support for all possible video formats and codecs

Virtual webcam support was another highly demanded feature. Now you can apply some effects to your webcam, desktop or videos before sending it to other webcam programs. You need to install and configure v4l2loopback to use this feature.
Virtual camera support
Virtual camera support

And finally, i decided not just support GNU/Linux like other FLOSS webcam apps, i wanted to expand the horizons by also supporting Windows, increasing it's user base, and increment the possibility of receiving valuable users and developers.
Windows build support was available since 5.0.0rc1 (2 years ago), but it was not stable enough to run properly, it has a lot of crashes and dependency problems. All this problems has been solved in this release.
Surprisingly, Wine has a good enough webcam support, that allowed me to test Webcamoid without a Windows install. Of course, i've tested Webcamoid in a real Windows install and it worked reasonably well, it has some flaws of course, but considering all the work done i'm happy with the result.
Webcamoid running under Wine/Windows
Webcamoid running under Wine/Windows

The future


While working in Webcamoid i've received a lot of feedback, and also i had run a lot of ideas for improvement and expanding.
First I'll start describing the changes in near feature, that is the 7.x series. The very first think i need to do is a code cleanup, the pressure of releasing Webcamoid as quick as possible made me duplicate code here and there. Other features i want to add are temporized photo shot and support for compressed webcam streams.
For 8.x series, one of the most turn around features will be scriptable plugins, giving developers the possibility of creating and sharing cross-platform plugins, and reducing the build time of Webcamoid. The second and most important feature is to add support for Android build increasing the user base even more.

Downloads


You can download the binary packages for some distributions like Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu from my personal OBS, this packages are not tested at all and may required some fixes. For Arch Linux you can install webcamoid or webcamoid-git from AUR, this packages are officially maintained and tested by me.
If you want to download the source code and Windows builds go to Webcamoid's github.
If you want to build Webcamoid your self consult the wiki and the ports directory.
If you are a distribution packager, please contact me at the issues pages whether you have a problem building Webcamoid, or if you added Webcamoid to you distribution repositories, give me all necessary instructions to install, so i can add it to the wiki.

4 comments:

  1. I installed webcamoid 6.2.0-3 on ubuntu 16.04 (I tried 8.0.0 but I got errors about some packages could not be installed). I am able to see and control my webcams. I have v4l2loopback running and able to use the virtual device with other sources but I don't see how to get webcamoid to use the virtual device as its output. Webcamoid does have the virtual device listed as an available input. How do I get webcamoid to output to my virtual device /dev/video2?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi, I appreciate your feedback but please report all problems and questions at https://github.com/webcamoid/webcamoid/issues so it will be useful for other people, and I will be able to give a better answer.

      Delete
  2. I need custom developed camera app development. How can I reach you and talk for details?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Are you available to customize webcamoid to a specific need.
    This would be a highly scaled down version of the current version.

    ReplyDelete