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, and libcamera-raw.

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.

Before running these utilities, you’ll need to stop the vizy server:

sudo systemctl stop vizy-server

The libcamera utilities are installed on Vizy and in the shell search path (libcamera-vid, libcamera-still, etc). The advantage of using these utiltiies instead of the older ones is that libcamera offers better performance (significantly better images) over the older utilities and it’s more modular for mixing in customizations.

If you want to go back to the old stuff, you can change /boot/config.txt by commenting out the line that says “dtoverlay=imx477” and rebooting. You can then run raspistill, raspivid, etc, which are also installed. But when you do this, the Vizy server/software will not longer be able to get camera data and will likely give up and exit.