The long road to a working Cheese

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Cheeseis an interesting application that is designed totake still photos and movies using a webcam.In addition to its basic monitoring and recording abilities,Cheese can display and record real-time video effects similar tothose from theEffecTV project.Cheese is based on theGStreamermultimedia framework.From the Cheese project description:

Cheese started out as aGoogle Summer of Codeproject entitledPhotobooth-like application for the GNOME-Desktop.(See this GNOME Journalinterview with Daniel Siegel).Several additional GSoC projects involved Cheese, these includeCheese integration into Gnome withstudent Felix Kaser and mentor Daniel SiegelandExtend Cheese with OpenGL effects withstudent Filippo Argiolas and mentor Daniel Siegel.

The main features of Cheese include:

• Real-time video monitor window.
• Supports the selection of multiple video resolutions.
• Ability to take still .jpg photos with optional video effects.
• Has a countdown timer for taking still photos.
• Makes a click sound when a still photo is taken.
• Ability to record .ogv movies with sound and optional video effects.
• Can chain multiple video effects together.
• Built-in thumbnail library that shows recorded photos and movies.
• Displays photos withEye of GNOME.
• Plays movies withTotem Movie Player.
• Images and movies can be saved to files, emailed or exported toF-spot.

Your author installed version 2.24.2 of Cheese on an Ubuntu 8.10system using the standard Ubuntu package. The CPU was an Athlon 642800 running the 32 bit version of Ubuntu.Initially, an ancient Kensington VideoCam Model 67015 was triedas the video capture device, but the camera would not work.This was likely a system issue since other video applicationssuch asxawtvand EffecTV no longer saw the camera after the system wasupgraded from Ubuntu 8.04.A new HP Deluxe Webcam model KQ246AA (USB) with a built-in microphonewas purchased at the local big-box electronics store.Initially, the HP camera worked with xawtv, but not with Cheese(or EffecTV).

A bit of Googling found an Ubuntubug report that indicated others were havingsimilar issues with Cheese. Following the thread in the bug report,your author first tried the suggestion of installing a newer kernelfrom the Pre-released package updates. This did not fix the problem.Digging further into the bug report messages, the next attemptinvolved installing mercurial (hg), then cloning and installing thelatest uvcvideo driver from theLinuxTV site.This finally produced a video capture device that workedwith Cheese.

Operation of Cheese is quite straightforward, one can simply runthe application and start clicking photos. A few user interfaceissues were encountered. The Edit->Preferences menu allows oneto select the camera and its resolution, but no audio configurationchoices were given. It was necessary to run thegstreamer-properties application to select the camera's built-inUSB audio device. Sometimes, after a pull-down menu was selected,a gray rectangle was left where the menu used to reside, ontop of the moving video monitor. Sometimes the gray area wouldeventually disappear while other times it was necessary to move themain Cheese window to refresh the video display.

The Effects button is somewhat non-intuitive; when one clicks it,a set of effects is shown. It took a bit of playing around tofigure out that one needs to click Effects again to get back to themain video monitor window. A differently named "Monitor" button wouldbe useful here.When making movies, using resolution above 352x288 resulted in majorlosses of audio samples and jerky video.Both the USB camera's audio input and thesound card's auxiliary input were tried with similar results.The Cheese built-in documentation recommended usinggstreamer-properties to switch the default video output to X11/XShm/Xv,this was tried but the higher-res video was still jerky.A CPU with more muscle would likely improve this situation.

Your author was left with the impression that Cheese and its ancillaryapplications could greatly benefit from the addition of a few extrafeatures. It would be more fun to look at still photos ifEye of Gnome's slideshow capability had the ability to step throughthe stills on a timed interval. It should be noted that it ispossible to export images to F-Spot, which can display a timed slide show.Similarly, Totem could really use some more advanced features such asa pause button with single-frame stepping capabilities.The documentation claims that it is possible to right-click the recordedimage or video thumbnail and fire up a non-default viewer, butyour author was unable to make this work.The video effects are very cool, but there are no audio effects;LV2 comes to mind here.Some of these ideas might make some good 2009 Google Summer of Codeprojects.

Despite encountering a number of bugs and user interfacedifficulties, Cheese is indeed a unique and useful application.Cheese is the first application your author has found that canproduce a working movie from a web cam.At this point, or at least with this hardware configuration, Cheeseis not quite ready for use by non-technical users, nonetheless it isa great application that shows much promise.