Cheese is a relatively new open source webcam application for Linux that supports image and video capture and allows users to apply visual effects. Created by Daniel Siegel for Google's Summer of Code program, Cheese closely resembles a Mac OS X program called Photobooth. Cheese 0.2.1 was released yesterday with some nice new features like a countdown timer and support for saving pictures to Flickr.
Cheese is built on top of the GStreamer open source media development framework and also uses GTK, Cairo, and D-Bus. Optional Flickr support depends on Ross Burton's Postr tool. According to Siegel, video support is still experimental and may "kill your cat."
Although Cheese doesn't have a tremendous amount of practical value, it's pretty good at what it does, and it serves as a nice example of how V4L can be used with GStreamer. If you want to see GStreamer pipelines in action, check out the source code.
Although I've complained about GStreamer's video playback quality and relative weakness in that area compared to Xine, the power and versatility of GStreamer as a development framework never ceases to amaze me. Used in applications ranging from video editing programs to webcam capture software, GStreamer is clearly very useful for media application development.
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