tcam-capture¶

tcam-capture is the general purpose image retrieval application of The Imaging Source under Linux.

It is considered an application for debugging/testing purposes.

Keyboard Shortcuts¶

The following is a complete list of shortcuts tcam-capture offers.

keyboard shortcuts¶
Shortcut	Action
Ctrl-Shift-Q	Quit tcam-capture
Ctrl-U	Open format dialog Requires a device to already be open.
Ctrl-I	Open info dialog
Ctrl-O	Open device dialog
Ctrl-P	Open property dialog Requires a device to be already open.

Commandline Arguments¶

tcam-capture has several optional arguments to change its behavior:

-h, --help¶: Show this help message and exit.

--help-all¶: Display Qt specific options.

--serial <serial>¶: Open device with serial immediately.

-v, --version¶: Display version information.

Additionally GStreamer arguments can be passed to retrieve debug information about the streams. The following GStreamer commandline arguments are currently supported:

--gst-debug
--gst-debug-level
--gst-debug-no-color

For more information concerning gstreamer debugging/logging, see Logging

Dialogs¶

The following is a description of all dialog windows tcam-capture may open.

Device Dialog¶

The device dialog will list all The Imaging Source devices that are supported by tiscamera.

To see which devices are supported by tiscamera, see supported devices.

Property Dialog¶

The property dialog allows interaction with all device properties.

Properties on the same tab are refreshed when:

The active tab is switched
The Refresh button is clicked
The user presses F5.
A property is changed

Caps Dialog¶

The caps dialog allows a full configuration of the used device format.

Info¶

Stream¶

Displays information about the current stream. These include:

Pipeline: The GStreamer pipeline used by tcam-capture.
Device caps- The GStreamer caps given to the source element by tcam-capture.
GstMeta - TcamMetaStatistics for the current stream.

Versions¶

Lists version information about tiscamera and other The Imaging Source packages.

tiscamera will only be listed as installed when installed as a debian package.

State¶

The state tab will display the current json property description.

Clicking Reset will update the the description.

Clicking Apply will apply the string to the tcambin.

Options¶

General¶

Conversion Element¶

Default: Auto

Selector for the tcambin property conversion-element.

See tcambin properties for details.

Image Saving¶

These properties are used to configure

Image Type¶

Default: bmp

Type in which images shall be saved.

Possible values are:

BMP - Windows Bitmap
GIF - Graphic Interchange Format
JPG - Joint Photographic Experts Group
JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group
PNG - Portable Network Graphics
PBM - Portable Bitmap Read
PGM - Portable Graymap Read
PPM - Portable Pixmap
XBM - X11 Bitmap
XPM - X11 Pixmap

Image Save Location¶

Default: /tmp/

Directory to which images shall be saved.

Image Filename Structure¶

Default: tcam-capture-{serial}-{caps}-{timestamp}.{extension}

The filename is a generic string that has to be a legal filename.

The following strings will be replaced by tcam-capture:

image filename replacements¶
string	substitute
{serial}	long serial of the device in use
{caps}	simplified caps string Will be filename friendly and as short as possible
{timestamp}	Timestamp in the format yyyyMMddthhmmss_zzz
{extension}	filename extension compatible with the selected image type

Video Saving¶

Video Type¶

Default: h264

h264 will be saved as mp4.

mjpeg will be saved as avi.

Video Save Location¶