Webcam and Cheese: Unbelievably slow

I have a machine with 4 GIG of RAM on a 64 bit computer. Yet, Cheese is unbelievably slow in recording videos. To my surprise, even YouTube records videos faster than Cheese.

What would be an apt alternative for video recording on Ubuntu systems?

Solution 1:

Testing a couple of Webcam tools because of the slowness of Cheese (Very slow indeed) as suggested by Geppettvs I have the following:

GUCView (As suggested by Geppettvs) which installs and works the following way:

The following line will add the PPA for this app, update the repositories and install the app:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pj-assis/ppa -y && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install guvcview

After which you can run the app with the command guvcview. Be warned that if your webcam is not in /dev/video0 it will throw a warning. You will need to change it to where your webcam is, for example:

guvcview -d /dev/video1 - In my case it was in video1, but it can be in video2, video3... Depends on what USB port it was connected to. guvcview does not automatically detect the webcam if it is connected in another one that is not video0.

This offers many options compared to Cheese:

Camorama - Much faster than guvcview and obviously MUCH more than Cheese

It has the same problem as guvcview in regards to finding the webcam device. You need to run it from terminal like this: camorama -d /dev/video1 if your webcam is not in video0.

There is also Kamerka but since it needed to download a lot of KDE libraries I tested this one in another Pc with Kubuntu and works excellent.

Solution 2:

You may wish to give GUCView a try; it is in the default repositories of Ubuntu 12.04 and probably other version. The official website at sourceforge provides comprehensive information about the software but it is very simple to use indeed.

Here's a screenshot of GUCView in action:

Solution 3:

kamerka takes nice photos but it does NOT do videos as of the latest version I could find. Cheese, not only is horribly slow but it can slow down your computer. It just amazes me that no one seems to have a descent webcam capture for Ubuntu. Skype works great so why not? Joe