A camera app for Linux that doesn't lie to you about what your webcam can do.
A black window, a big eye that blinks when it takes the picture, and no hidden settings. Photos and video, with whichever microphone you pick.
Because the three alternatives each failed at something different:
- Kamoso is no longer maintained.
- Webcamoid grabs the last row of the camera's capability list, which tends to be the worst one available: uncompressed video at 1080p. On a USB 2.0 webcam that is 5 fps, and its pipeline adds visible lag on top.
- Snapshot picks the right format, but asks for interpolated 1080p, applies limited colour range (16-235) to a stream that arrives in full range (washed out image), and mirrors the preview with no way to turn it off. It has not a single setting for any of that: eleven config keys and none of them is resolution, format or mirror.
Iris always asks for MJPG, lets you choose the resolution, and mirror and rotation are switches that remember how you left them.
Almost every cheap USB webcam claims 30 fps and doesn't deliver. Iris ships a meter so you can check yours:
python3 v4l2cam.py # lists the modes and measures the real fpsOn the camera this was written with (a REDRAGON Live Camera), choosing well versus choosing badly is a threefold difference:
| Format | 1920x1080 | 1280x720 | 640x480 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MJPG (compressed) | 30 claimed, 15 real | 30 claimed, 15 real | 30 claimed, 15 real |
| YUYV (uncompressed) | 5 | 10 | 30 |
Uncompressed 1080p video is about 60 MB per second, and a USB 2.0 port gives you roughly a third of that. The camera has no choice but to drop to five frames. That is why Iris doesn't even offer you the raw format: it only invites a bad choice.
And the status bar tells you the fps you are actually getting, not the ones the camera promises.
- Photos: with mirror and rotation off, it saves the exact JPEG the camera sends, without recompressing. Not a single bit lost. Flipping or rotating does mean touching pixels, and that path recompresses (quality is configurable).
- Video: H.264 with AAC audio, choosing which of your microphones to use.
- Mirror: see yourself with the sides swapped, or the way others see you.
- Rotation: a quarter turn at a time, for cameras mounted sideways.
- It recovers by itself: if Discord or your browser holds the camera, it tells you who has it by name and opens as soon as they let go.
- A single window: a webcam only accepts one program at a time, so opening it twice raises the existing window instead of leaving you a useless black one.
- Several cameras: they get detected and listed by name. One webcam usually
exposes several
/dev/videoNnodes and most of them are metadata, not image; only the ones that can actually capture MJPG are offered. - Advanced panel (
Ctrl+Shift+A): brightness, contrast, saturation, gain and exposure straight from the camera's own controls, plus quality and language. Deliberately tucked away. Controls your camera doesn't support show up greyed out rather than hidden, so you can tell it's the hardware saying no.
Shortcuts: Space shoots, R rotates, Ctrl+O opens the folder.
Photos go to ~/Pictures/Iris and videos to ~/Videos/Iris (or whatever your
system calls those folders).
English and Spanish, picked from your system locale and switchable in the
advanced panel. Adding one is copying a block in idiomas.py and translating
it: no .ts files, no lrelease.
No OpenCV, no GStreamer. v4l2cam.py talks to the kernel directly through
ioctl and hands over frames as raw JPEG, which is how they already arrive
from a webcam in MJPG. Qt decodes that on its own, which means:
- no colour conversion layer washing the image out,
- the photo can be saved without recompressing,
- and video is built by piping those same JPEGs into
ffmpeg.
Latency is kept down by draining the frame queue on every read and using the newest one. That is the difference between seeing yourself live and seeing yourself late.
The ioctl numbers are not hardcoded: they are computed with the same formula
the kernel uses, from the actual size of each structure. That is why the
structures carry real unions instead of hand-measured padding, so ctypes works
out the alignment by itself and the numbers come out right on 64-bit as well as
on 32-bit or ARM, where a pointer is a different size and the structures change
accordingly.
- Python 3 with PyQt6
- ffmpeg (only needed to record video)
- A kernel with V4L2, so any Linux
On Fedora:
sudo dnf install python3-pyqt6 ffmpeggit clone https://github.com/TVTvirus/iris.git ~/Documents/iris
cd~/Documents/iris && ./instalar.shThat puts the launcher in your desktop menu and the iris command in your
terminal. To remove it, ./instalar.sh --quitar.
The spec file is in the repo, so a package is three commands away:
rpmdev-setuptree
spectool -g -R iris.spec # fetches the tarball from the release tag
rpmbuild -ba iris.specThat leaves an installable iris-*.noarch.rpm in ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/
and a source package in ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/, which is what a COPR build takes.
It needs rpm-build, rpmdevtools, desktop-file-utils and python3-devel
(only for the Python macros: nothing here gets compiled).
It works and gets daily use. What's missing:
- Never tested on anything other than x86-64 Linux with a UVC webcam.
- The code and comments are in Spanish; only the interface is bilingual.
MIT.