Right, happy new year to all the picamera users! Many thanks for your excellent bug reports, suggestions, and comments last year. As you've no doubt seen above,
1.0 is now released and the highlights this time are:
Debian packaging!
If you want to transition from using the pypi packages, firstly uninstall your picamera installation, then re-install with apt-get. There's instructions in the docs for each installation method, but assuming you were using the "system installation" it'd go something like this:
Code: Select all
$ sudo pip uninstall picamera
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python-picamera
The "sudo apt-get update" bit is only in there to make apt update its list of available packages (as this is a new addition it wouldn't know about it otherwise). If you're using python 3, replace "python-picamera" in the last line with "python3-picamera" (it's fine to have both installed if you switch between 2 and 3 regularly).
For any Arch/other-distro users out there - fear not, the pypi packages won't be going away - this is just an option to make updates a little easier for Raspbian users (I'm more than happy to accept patches for Arch packaging!)
Resizing supported ... mostly
All the capture methods, and the start-recording method now accept a "resize" parameter which will place a resizer before the encoder in the image processing pipeline. Why is this useful? Because the GPU can't handle encoding full resolution video, but with a resizer in place you can record full *frame* video (2592x1944) just at a lower resolution (say, 1024x768). There's a
recipe in the docs covering this functionality.
Why do I say "mostly"? Because I've utterly failed to get cropping working with the resizer. What this means for the moment is that you're stuck with 4:3 aspect ratios for full-frame use (anything else will produce squished looking output).
GPIO bug squished
An
annoying bug for people trying to use picamera in conjunction with RPi.GPIO has been squashed - many thanks to Martin O'Hanlon for reporting the issue and providing valuable feedback on it!
Circular recording
A new ring-buffer based stream is provided which allows you to record the last
n seconds of video and then dump it to disk (or the network, or whatever else you fancy). Again,
recipes included.
Anyway, those are the headlines - there's some smaller changes in there too (more raw formats, video-port-based RGB captures are back, MJPEG added as a recording format, current frame meta-data in the new "frame" property, etc. etc.). Do feel free to file bug reports, feature suggestions, and so forth at GitHub (or post something to the camera board here - I can't promise I monitor that quite as closely, but you'll likely get a wider audience!).
Have fun!
Dave.
Author of / contributor to a few pi related things (picamera, Sense HAT emulator, gpiozero, piwheels, etc.), and currently a software engineer at Canonical responsible for Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.