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====== Running the Raspberry Pi camera utilities ======
 
If you have experience with Raspberry Pi's and Raspberry Pi cameras, you're probably familiar with ''raspivid'', ''raspistill'', and ''raspiraw''.  As of January 2021, these utilities have been deprecated and replaced with libcamera utilities ''libcamera-vid'', ''libcamera-still'', ''libcamera-raw'' and others.  

===== What is libcamera? =====

Libcamera is a modular, open, customizable, and standardized camera interface within Linux.  The older Raspberry Pi camera interface was provided by Broadcom and was proprietary.  If you compare images from the older interface to the new libcamera interface, you'll notice that the libcamera images are significantly better -- less noise and better dynamic range.  This is due to improved noise reduction, color correction and other algorithms that the Raspberry Pi engineers have added to their libcamera implementation. 

===== Running the utilities =====

Before running these utilities, you’ll need to stop the Vizy server because it is likely using the camera interface:

  sudo systemctl stop vizy-server

This will stop the Vizy server.  (To run the server again, either reboot or run ''%%sudo systemctl start vizy-server%%'').  You'll also want to [[wiki:connect_monitor_etc|hook Vizy to a monitor]], as most utilities preview the video through the monitor.  

The libcamera utilities are installed on Vizy and in the shell search path:

  * [[https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/accessories/camera.html#libcamera-vid|libcamera-vid]]
  * [[https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/accessories/camera.html#libcamera-still|libcamera-still]]
  * [[https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/accessories/camera.html#libcamera-raw|libcamera-raw]]
  * [[https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/accessories/camera.html#libcamera-and-libcamera-apps|and others]]

==== Running the legacy utilities ====

If you want to go back to the legacy utilities, you can change ''/boot/config.txt'' by commenting out the line that says ''%%dtoverlay=imx477%%'' and rebooting. You can then run ''raspivid'', ''raspistill'', etc., which are also installed. However, when you make this change to config.txt, the Vizy server/software will no longer be able to get camera data and will likely give up and exit.
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