So, last week I posted I started changing Cheese to use Camerabin, the high level GStreamer element that can capture video, photos and show preview. I can now say that Cheese is now working using Camerabin as its base, at least for me and two other people.

I’m a little embarrassed to say that the black preview problem I was having all along was actually because of lack of dconf installed in jhbuild. Because of that, my contrast and saturation were always set to zero when I started Cheese and I thought that was a problem with the preview, specially because I did have a problem with clutter-gst before. Thanks to Laura I discovered that.

Other problems were much easier to solve after I stopped debugging this nonexistent problem. The main problem was that Camerabin sets a lot of stuff by default, such as resolution and filtered video format. This caused a lot of negotiation problems depending on which camera was used or which size of photo or video was requested. After working around the defaults, it seems to be working ok now.

Another improvement was to use Camerabin’s signal “set-video-resolution-fps” to set resolution for photo and video, instead of using a capsfilter for that. In the future, we might be able to switch between photo-capture and video-capture modes in Cheese without turning off the camera. But, for now, I’ll leave it like it used to be, specially because it seems Camerabin doesn’t set image-capture size separate from video-capture size as it should.

I just posted a bug with the patch to add camerabin to master in Cheese. I really hope it’s working perfectly, but it would be really nice to have more people testing it. So, if you feel like it, check camerabin branch and tell me the results.

Next week I plan to work on other improvements in libcheese. Maybe I’ll try to make some improvements in the API before the API freeze for 3.0.