This week I started working on libcheese to see if it is in a better shape for GNOME 3.0.

Last week I talked briefly about Cheese Widget not working right. I continued to look into that and discovered that the reason cheese-test-widget was not working was gconfaudiosrc, the source Cheese uses to capture audio. It makes sense that this doesn’t work, since Cheese is now using GSettings, but I really couldn’t understand why Cheese works with it (without using Cheese Widget) and cheese-test-widget doesn’t (and with the same code for pipeline). The fact is that replacing gconfaudiosrc solved the problem for cheese-test-widget.

Instead of changing only the audio source, I decided to start changing Cheese to use Camerabin. This is one of my goals for GNOME Outreach Program. Camerabin takes care of taking pictures, recording video and preview, so it fits Cheese perfectly, and Cheese won’t have to do this all again.

First part of using Camerabin in Cheese worked great, with some help of my mentor Thiago, camerabin specialist. I even made a small patch for camerabin. I can take pictures and record video using Cheese with Camerabin, and it even solved a bug that I had using Cheese master branch.

The tricky part about using Camerabin in Cheese is that, besides recording video and taking pictures, Cheese has effects, and it does a live preview of this effects. You can set a “video-source-filter” property in Camerabin which takes a GStreamer element as argument and sets a filter between capture and all the other components (video-capture, image-capture, view finder).

I tried to add Cheese complexity inside this video-source-filter, with a big Gstreamer Bin that splits camera into the branch that is going to image capture, video capture and preview and the other branch that will be used for live preview of the effects. When I added that, I started experiencing again the black preview bug. Since I’m the only one that I know having this bug and can’t find a way to fix it, I can’t actually tell if other people would actually see the preview when using Cheese with Camerabin. I have been trying to persuade some people to test it for me and tell me. Maybe you could do it too? Check camerabin branch in Cheese repository in git.gnome.org.

One thing that is definitely broken is to apply effects. Yes, I know Cheese is no fun without it. I am working on getting it fixed. If you have worked with GStreamer for a while, you probably had negotiation problems that were hard to fix too.

While working on that I ended up making a patch to be applied to master to handle GStreamer warning and error messages. And another one just removing an extra colorspace.