How to programmatically capture a webcam photo

Question

What\'s the simplest way in Ubuntu 11.10 to programmatically guide (either from Bash or Python) the user to capture a webcam photo of themselves?

I can launch a simple a

Answer 1

If you want to do this via Python, it looks like you have a few options. The Pygame library has the ability to access cameras.

If that's unsatisfactory, you can go much lower level and access the Video 4 Linux 2 API directly using ioctl calls using Python's fcntl library.