Plum Geek Forum

One of the first things I did when I got the Pi configured was connect to it over RealVNC and try to fire up the camera.

The built-in raspistill utility will not be mirrored over RealVNC, since it renders directly to GPU.

However the QV4L2 utility will work fine, it will render video from the Pi Cam to a window, and it can be mirrored over RealVNC. It has a bunch of handy settings, including vertical flip of the camera image.

Try this:

sudo apt-get install qv4l2
sudo modprobe bcm2835-v4l2
qv4l2

If you want to permanently add the bcm2835-v4l2 driver, edit /etc/modules and add "bcm2835-v4l2" to the file. The camera driver module will be installed at boot time.

This is another reason I use OpenCV. The OpenCV windows display the camera contents (stills AND video) over VNC.

I believe it does this by doing what you did, but behind the scenes as part of their package.

In Python I use the picamera and cv2 packages for anything relating to the camera... because the cv2 stuff hooks me into all kinds of computer vision goodies.

-Erik