# Announcing libobscura

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2024-11-15 14:00:14

There are already other libraries for camera support on Linux. You can use the V4L2 APIs directly, or use libcamera, or libmegapixels.

They all strike various middle points on the power vs user-friendliness scale. Having worked with all of them while developing camera support for the Librem 5, I never got the impression that any of them are particularly easy to use.

Libobscura is an experiment because it tries to find an API that fulfills the needs of most people and remains hard to use wrong.

Figure 2: My "Perfect tool" conjecture. Imagine you have a perfectly well useable tool covering some of your needs. If your needs grow, the perfect tool covering those tools cannot be easier to use than your old tool. And humans are imperfect. This applies to APIs, as well. I put my rough idea of where I think a couple of examples fall. Libcamera tries to be as general as possible, so it's on the far right. OpenCV has Python bindings, so it's up top. Libobscura starts out a bit to the left and top, and I hope to push it to the right, to explore how many use cases can be added while staying easy.

Perhaps it's impossible to improve on what current libraries do. But now libobscura is a space where it's possible to try out radical changes without bothering the maintainers of existing libraries – for example, to try out an entirely new approach.