What software is available for using webcams or ways of checking if my webcam is working correctly after installing Ubuntu.
21 Answers
Cheese 
Cheese uses your webcam to take photos and videos, applies fancy special effects and lets you share the fun with others. It was written as part of Google's 2007 Summer of Code lead by daniel g. siegel and mentored by Raphaël Slinckx. Under the hood, Cheese uses GStreamer to apply fancy effects to photos and videos. With Cheese it is easy to take photos of you, your friends, pets or whatever you want and share them with others.
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1Note that this is not the best solution to test if the webcam works because, in my case and from lots of Ubuntu or Mint forums, you can have "no device found" with Cheese while the webcam will work with Guvcview. So to test the hardware and the driver the order of testing should be: 1-Gucvview, 2-Cheese, ... and, far behind, Skype where, using the webcam, obviously needs much more efforts to setup!– c05772Dec 26, 2019 at 22:58
VLC can be used for the given purpose.
Media - Open capture device...
Click drop-down menu for Device selection - Video device name.
When something like/dev/video0 appears, just click Enter.
Then Play.
One can also launch directly the VLC webcam.
Save the playlist as the VLC webcam is running. Media - Save playlist to file... (e.g. save as vlc-webcam.xspf playlist file). Starting that playlist file in VLC will start the webcam.
Then one may create a desktop file for the same purpose; it should be similar to this:
[Desktop Entry]
Name=VLC Webcam
Comment=Webcam vlc
Exec=vlc /path/to/vlc-webcam.xspf
Icon=/add/some/image/png/file.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Categories=AudioVideo;Player;Recorder;
Make it executable. If you copy that into /usr/share/applications it will be searched and launched directly as any other application. In Synapse:
ffplay from ffmpeg
sudo apt install ffmpeg
ffplay /dev/video0
See also: How to check available webcams from the command line?
Tested in Ubuntu 19.10.
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Will this also work with usb microscopes as well. I guess microscopes are just fancy cameras with lens? I am planning to buy one from eBay but the cd it comes with supports only windows platform so was wondering if I could use ffmpeg– user0193Jan 3 at 7:15
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@user0193 what's the microscope model? It might be impossible to determine compabitility if the manufacturer does not give enough information. Image information could be sent in a number of non-standard obscure ways and decoded by an equally obscure decoder. But there's a chance. Worse case someone has to reverse engineer the thing. What are you planning on doing with it BTW? Jan 3 at 17:21
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Mousetrap
What is MouseTrap?
Mousetrap is a standalone GNOME application that allows users with physical impairments to move a mouse cursor. It uses a webcam to track the motion of any object visible by the camera and moves the mouse cursor according to the path of the tracked object (a user's head, for example). Distributed with software that allows accessible mouse clicking, MouseTrap will give most physically impaired users access to the full functionality of a mouse. Our ultimate goal is to have a usable, stable solution that allows users to control their cursors just as well as someone using a mouse. MouseTrap is written in Python, based on the OpenCV library and uses image processing to translate the user's head movements into mouse events (movements, clicks) which allow users to interact with the different desktops managers and applications.
How does it work?
Youtube demo video
Guvcview
Description - Simple GTK+ interface for capturing and viewing video from devices supported by the Linux UVC driver.
Features
Video Recording - Yes
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - Yes
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - Yes
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - Yes
Note - May need to run the app from terminal to change the device location. By default it reads /dev/video0. If webcam is on video1 you will need to run it like this: guvcview -d /dev/video1.
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I have Logitech c920 and I get maximum 15 FPS on this software. Not very good.– jediDec 31, 2017 at 18:45
QtCAM
Description - QtCAM is free, Open Source Linux Web Camera Software with more than 10 image control settings, extension settings and Color space switching. Users could connect up to 6 cameras and stream videos simultaneously. It would also work with any V4L2 compatible device.
Features Video Recording - Yes
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - Yes
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - Yes
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - Yes
Kamerka
Description - KDE application which uses Video4Linux to get image from webcam, with ability to save photos. It features easy to use, animated and well-integrated user interface.
Features
Video Recording - No
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - No
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - No
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - No
GUI Based - Yes
Empathy
Description - Chat Client with many features including Audio/Video Chat, Chat logging and history and a lot of other stuff. Mentioned here mainly because of an easy and fast way of testing the webcam.
Features
Video Recording - No
Image Capture - No
Video/Image Effects - No
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - No
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - Yes
Note - Shown here because it is an easy option to check if Webcam works.
Skype (Skype Website)
Description - VoIP App that can be used to check Audio/Video features of a webcam (Aside from the rest of the long description about what Skype obviously is and does ;) ).
Features
Video Recording - No
Image Capture - No
Video/Image Effects - No
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - No
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - Yes
Note - Shown here because it is an easy option to check if Webcam works. Not the first one I would actually recommend but hey, it's an option.
Description - Websites to test if a webcam is working. Can be used through Firefox, Chromium or Chrome (Or any other Browser found in Ubuntu that supports Flash Player)
Features
Video Recording - No
Image Capture - No
Video/Image Effects - No
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - No
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - Yes (Web Based / Flash PLayer Based)
Note - Shown here because it is an easy option to check if Webcam works. Ubuntu installs the needed drivers automatically. There is no need to install them for 99% of all webcams.
Kamoso
Description - Utility that does the very simple actions a webcam offers, like taking pictures or recording videos and adds some extra features that will make the webcam usage both funnier and more useful.
Features
Video Recording - Yes
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - No
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - No
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - Yes
FSWebcam
Description - Tiny and flexible webcam command-line program for capturing images from a V4L1/V4L2 device. It accepts a number of formats, can skip the first (possibly bad) frames before performing the actual capture, and can perform simple manipulation on the captured image, such as resizing, averaging multiple frames or overlaying a caption or an image.
Features
Video Recording - No
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - No
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - Yes (PNG and JPG)
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes (Via command line options)
GUI Based - No
Note - Using it is as simple as fswebcam -d /dev/video1 image.png where /dev/video1 is your webcam source and image.png is the name of the image file to save to.
Webcam
Description - Utility that captures images from a video4linux device such as bttv, annotates them and uploads them to a webserver in an endless loop using FTP or SSH.
Features
Video Recording - No
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - No
Send Video/Image Remotely - Yes
Save in Different Formats - No (JPG Only)
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - No
Camorama
Description - Utility to view and save images from a webcam or any other Video4Linux device. It can apply a number of image filters and make remote captures.
Features
Video Recording - No
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - Yes
Send Video/Image Remotely - Yes
Save in Different Formats - Yes
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - Yes
Note - May need to run the app from terminal to change the device location. By default it reads /dev/video0. If webcam is on video1 you will need to run it like this: camorama -d /dev/video1.
CamGrab
Description - Tool meant to be used from shell scripts, etc, for grabbing a single image from a Webcam. It comes with a simple shellscript which will produce a timestamped JPG for use as a webcam.
Features
Video Recording - No
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - No
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - No
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - No
GUI Based - No
Motion
Description - Program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed. Or in other words, it can detect motion. It is a command line based tool. It has no graphical user interface. Everything is setup either via the command line or via configuration files.
Features
Video Recording - Yes
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - No
Send Video/Image Remotely - Yes
Save in Different Formats - Yes (JPG and PPM)
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - No
Note - How to use it can be found in How to make a Stop Motion or Time-lapse video with webcam?
Luvcview
Description - Camera viewer for UVC based webcams. It includes an mjpeg decoder and is able to save the video stream as an AVI file.
Features
Video Recording - Yes
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - Yes
Send Video/Image Remotely - No
Save in Different Formats - Yes
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - Yes
Google Video/Audio Plugin (Google Hangout)
Description - Google Plugin used for Video and Audio conferences (Eg: Gmail Chat or Google Hangout).
Features
Video Recording - Yes
Image Capture - Yes
Video/Image Effects - Yes
Send Video/Image Remotely - Yes
Save in Different Formats - Yes
Options to Change Video/Image Properties - Yes
GUI Based - Yes (Web based)
Note - Shown here because it is an easy option to check if Webcam works. Ubuntu installs the needed drivers automatically. There is no need to install them for 99% of all webcams.
Description - Websites to test if a webcam is working. Can be used through Firefox, Chromium or Chrome (Or any other Browser found in Ubuntu that supports Flash Player)
Or any web meeting or conference website will help you check whether webcam and microphone is working properly.
Webcam Recorder
Description - Record video from your computer's camera and/or record audio from your microphone
It is a firefox addon. The file size is 68,12 KB. This is a solution to check if your webcam is working.