libuvc is a cross-platform library for USB video devices, built atop libusb. It enables fine-grained control over USB video devices exporting the standard USB Video Class (UVC) interface, enabling developers to write drivers for previously unsupported devices, or just access UVC devices in a generic fashion.

Getting and Building libuvc

Prerequisites: You will need libusb and CMake installed.

To build, you can just run these shell commands:

git clone https://github.com/libuvc/libuvc
cd libuvc
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make && sudo make install

and you’re set! If you want to change the build configuration, you can edit CMakeCache.txt in the build directory, or use a CMake GUI to make the desired changes.

There is also BUILD_EXAMPLE and BUILD_TEST options to enable the compilation of example and uvc_test programs. To use them, replace the cmake .. command above with cmake .. -DBUILD_TEST=ON -DBUILD_EXAMPLE=ON. Then you can start them with ./example and ./uvc_test respectively. Note that you need OpenCV to build the later (for displaying image).

Developing with libuvc

The documentation for libuvc can currently be found at https://libuvc.github.io/.

Happy hacking!