fswebcam For Linux

fswebcam is an open source, small and free command-line/graphical software that has been designed to help you easily capture still images from your webcam device on any Linux kernel-based operating system. It saves the final image to a file or send it to stdio (standard input/output).

The fswebcam application is capable of grabbing images from a V4L1 (Video4Linux version 1) or V4L2 (Video4Linux version 2) compatible webcam device, automatically reduces the noise and draws a caption before outputting the final image.

It provides users with a wide range of command-line options that can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘fswebcam --help’ command in the Terminal app. Among these, we can mention the ability to run the program in loop mode or in the background, to select the input, tuner, frequency and palette format to use, as well as to set capture resolution and frame rate.

To install and use the fswebcam program on a GNU/Linux distribution, you must download the source archive from Softpedia or straight from the project’s official website, save it somewhere on your PC, unpack it, open a terminal emulator app and go to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/fswebcam-20140113).

Then, run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile fswebcam. After a successful configuration/compilation process, install the program system wide by running the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user or the ‘make install’ command as root.

Under the hood, the program uses the GD Graphics Library to handle the compression of the images, supporting the JPG (JPEG), PNG and FreeType file formats. It is written entirely in the C programming language and can be easily installed on any distribution of GNU/Linux, supporting 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms.