Feb 082011
A lot of people has been asking me (or complaining) what is Kamoso and what we intend to do with it, so I’ve decided to use a blog post to explain it.
Short Description:
Kamoso is an application for taking Pictures and Videos using any webcam.
Long Description:
Kamoso is an application between two worlds, “Multimedia” and “Toys”. While its main propose may be seen as just “Take Pictures” and “Take Videos”, our plan goes beyond that: we are planning to add a bunch of effects that will allow to the user to play with the webcam, we want it to be fun, in the end. All of these is followed by a tightly integration with the Web 2.0, by adding export features to the most common Web 2.0 services, such YouTube, Facebook, twitpic…
Current 2.0 (aka Velázquez):
- Make Kamoso rock solid
- We moved to QtGStreamer (part of the last point)
- Improve interface usability
3.0 (Future):
- Effects: investigate what GStreamer offers and try to get the best out of it
- Simplify Web 2.0 integration: make it easier to add support for new services
- Interface candy: make the interface more appealing to the eye, properly integrate the effects
Screenshoots:
Kamoso 1
Videos:
Small review of Kamoso 2.0
Pre 2.0
Help needed:
- Semaphore designs (What happens from when you click at the shot button, and when the picture is actually taken)
- Mockups, ideas, whatever!
Why do you use GStreamer instead of the actually cross-platform Phonon capture API?
Because today Phonon doesn’t support what we need, and because we want to guarantee the same experience in all platforms we support (which atm is only linux).
There’s a standard icon for sharing : http://www.openshareicons.com/
Concerning some features and effects, you should have a look at Cheese ( face detection SVG overlay, efffects, gstreamer effects, libcheese ) :
http://programmermusings.blogspot.com/2011/01/new-effect-in-cheese-face-detection.html
http://programmermusings.blogspot.com/2011/01/svg-overlays-in-cheese.html
http://blog.fujii.eti.br/?p=70
http://programmermusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/cheese-decoration-design-contest.html
http://programmermusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-gstreamer-plugin.html
Thanks for the icon, we’ll use the Oxygen version in alpha2
About Cheese, we keep a good track of it, and by sure we’ll try to catchup in the 3.0 version.
Thanks for the links!
For me, Kamoso is an application that seems like a never-compilable application under Gentoo:
– <<>>
Build type Gentoo
Install path /usr
Compiler flags:
C -march=prescott -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -Wno-long-long -std=iso9899:1990 -Wundef -Wcast-align -Werror-implicit-function-declaration -Wchar-subscripts -Wall -W -Wpointer-arith -Wwrite-strings -Wformat-security -Wmissing-format-attribute -fno-common
C++ -march=prescott -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -Wnon-virtual-dtor -Wno-long-long -ansi -Wundef -Wcast-align -Wchar-subscripts -Wall -W -Wpointer-arith -Wformat-security -fno-exceptions -DQT_NO_EXCEPTIONS -fno-check-new -fno-common -Werror=return-type -Woverloaded-virtual -fno-threadsafe-statics -fvisibility=hidden -fvisibility-inlines-hidden
Linker flags:
Executable -Wl,–enable-new-dtags -Wl,-O1 -Wl,–as-needed
Module -Wl,–enable-new-dtags -Wl,–fatal-warnings -Wl,–no-undefined -lc -Wl,-O1 -Wl,–as-needed
Shared -Wl,–enable-new-dtags -Wl,–fatal-warnings -Wl,–no-undefined -lc -Wl,-O1 -Wl,–as-needed
– Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
* ERROR: media-video/kamoso-9999 failed:
* cmake failed
*
* Call stack:
* ebuild.sh, line 56: Called src_configure
* environment, line 4227: Called kde4-base_src_configure
* environment, line 3330: Called cmake-utils_src_configure
* environment, line 1261: Called _execute_optionaly ‘src_configure’
* environment, line 643: Called enable_cmake-utils_src_configure
* environment, line 1695: Called die
* The specific snippet of code:
* “${CMAKE_BINARY}” “${cmakeargs[@]}” “${CMAKE_USE_DIR}” || die “cmake failed”;
*
* If you need support, post the output of ‘emerge –info =media-video/kamoso-9999′,
* the complete build log and the output of ‘emerge -pqv =media-video/kamoso-9999′.
* This ebuild used the following eclasses from overlays:
* /var/lib/layman/kde/eclass/kde4-base.eclass
* /var/lib/layman/kde/eclass/kde4-functions.eclass
* /var/lib/layman/kde/eclass/git-2.eclass
* This ebuild is from an overlay named ‘kde’: ‘/var/lib/layman/kde/’
* The complete build log is located at ‘/var/tmp/portage/media-video/kamoso-9999/temp/build.log’.
* The ebuild environment file is located at ‘/var/tmp/portage/media-video/kamoso-9999/temp/environment’.
* S: ‘/var/tmp/portage/media-video/kamoso-9999/work/kamoso-9999′
Mmm, do you have QtGstreamer?
Hi, nice app, but, last time i tried it, i couldn’t resize the window less than the webcam resolution, making it unusable in a small netbook. Gnome’s Cheese has this ability.
Idea: What about integrating it into system settings, so photos taken using kamoso can be used directly as a user account image.
Hi!
Maybe the “traffic light” could be changed to look a little more realistic, like the real horizontal traffic lights:
http://jancoding.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/horizontal-traffic-light-3.jpg
http://jancoding.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/horizontal-traffic-light-2.jpg
http://jancoding.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/horizontal-traffic-light-1.jpg
Probably the Oxygen team could help with this
Or maybe this could be replaced by other kind of signals, like a “ready… go! with-a-flag” signal used in races:
http://jancoding.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/flag-start-signal.jpg
Or a gunfire signal:
http://jancoding.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/gun-start-signal.jpg
It could also be a face, getting ready to smile and say “cheese!” (translatable label, of course) in each of the 3 frames.
But still, the traffic light is probably the best for this kind of thing. Does it have sounds in v2.0?
Like “ding… ding…. ding…. diiiiiiing!” That could help too, in case you can’t/don’t want to be looking at the screen.
Great job, keep it up
A lot of people will love those (future) effects and funny things.
@Markus
Fwiw, GStreamer is also cross-platform. With a few minor modifications I think kamoso would work fine on all platforms where video capture is supported (currently these are only linux, windows and mac afaik).
i have tried old Qtgstreamer with effect from Gstreamer in my never ending plasmoid
.
And i believe kamoso can utilize Gstreamer’s effect better.
Yes, for 3.0 we’ll use QtGstreamer in the right way ™, we’re thinking on sharing the pipeline effects with Cheese (they already .desktop files defining the pipeline) so we can unify efforts.
ATM 2.0 is a version where we want to have something that just work to take pictures and record video, since is something that KDE has been lacking for a lot time now.
I hope it works fine in small screen (i.e netbook ).
I will work on that.
Hello,
why don’t use KIPI Plugins to export pictures ?
Website : http://www.kipi-plugins.org/
Exemple : http://agateau.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/20101120-share-menu21.png
We do use kipi-plugins, but not all of them.
We would like to whitelist the ones interesting for Kamoso, some of them are a little bit cluttered allowing a lot of advanced options that we don’t really want.
BTW, the Youtube Kamoso export is also a kipi-plugin.
How about the ability to stream over a network, in such a format that VLC and Kaffeine can watch? Those can both act as clients, and maybe both as servers (VLC for sure) if you need some implementation ideas.
Looks like a cool app, I’ll have to keep an eye on it! Well done.
That would be nice, maybe something to do with a plugin since is not the main propose of the application.
Thanks for the idea!
[...] el blog personal de Alex Fiestas nos encontramos con un artículo -curiosamente escrito en inglés- en el que describe lo que hace Kamoso, y en el que explica que [...]
you need to tweak the layout e.g make things align vertically, now semaphore is way to much to the left and miniatures should have width of the video capture (now is wider)
PS semaphore is ugly as hell!
please look at this maybe it will help you:
http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/4849/14981637.jpg
http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/4206/79191884.jpg
Some of these issues are already solved ! glad to see that we think more or less the same.
We’ll work on the rest and thanks for the pictures.
Hi,
kamoso-2.0 alpha2 crashes when I try to open settings if camera is not present
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=M1mtPAMD
Have you considered using the CV plugins to get something like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DGPQcr3GyQ&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
I can’t still use Kamoso, I think that something is wrong with Qt-Gstreamer. Always that I try to run kamoso, I get:
ASSERT: “ptr.m_class” in file /var/tmp/portage/media-sound/qt-gstreamer-0.10.1/work/qt-gstreamer-0.10.1/src/QGst/Ui/../../QGlib/refpointer.h, line 332
I’m using Qt-Gstreamer-0.10.0 and Kamoso from Git. Both of them are installed with Portage. I tried installing Qt-Gstreamer from Git but I get the same problem…
I’m not sure what’s the problem :/ can you please fill a bug at bugs.kde.org ?
@afiestas
Sorry for the late comment, I’ve just did the report: https://bugs.kde.org/post_bug.cgi. Thank you so much, I will hope for fixing. If you need more information just ask me, I put all information I could
@Blablabla
how do you get portage for kamoso? from overlay?
how to emerge then?
Please, somebody, email me a WRITTEN instruction for use of Kamoso. I really need to know how to
deal with video: not only how to start it, but more important, how to end it, and how to get the sound from
the camera microphone to record with the video.
–Doug –[email protected]
Looks like https://github.com/hipersayanX/Webcamoid#readme is what you try to achieve. It already supports effects and uses the same backend.
[...] Fiestas). Un saludo a Alex por su generosidad e innovación a raudales que lleva consigo. En el blog de A. Fiestas podéis ver toda la información para descargaros Kamoso libremente, como es ley en la nación de [...]
Hi Alex, how i can to hide the pictures viewer?, thanks you so much. Something like:
http://maurobit.webege.com/kam.png