----
name="Pi Camera in 2025 (+ MotionEye)"
year="2025"

----

I recently thought it could be fun to set up a mini "security camera" system in
my apartment (I don't plan to actually rely on this, it's more of a fun
webcam pointed outside).

In any case, I happened to have a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GiB) and a Pi Camera V2.1
lying around from some old projects, so I figured I could use those pretty
easily.

It sounds like, at some point prior to 2024, Raspbian switched to using libcamera
instead of V4L2. Unfortunately, a bunch of guides online still reference the legacy
API, so I figured I'd write a guide for people in 2025 using the libcamera API.

I was clued into this change by
[this forum post](https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=362707), so
thanks to the writer of that post.

### MicroSD card imaging

A couple years ago the Raspberry Pi foundation released
[Raspberry Pi Imager](https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/getting-started.html#raspberry-pi-imager),
which helps you set up a microSD card with Raspbian installed on it quite easily compared
to before (when you needed to manually edit the `ssh` and `wpa_supplicant.conf` files
to configure things properly). I installed Raspbian Lite (64-bit edition) with this tool
and booted up my Pi.

### Checking connectivity

You do **not** need to enable anything in `raspi-config`. `vcgencmd get_camera` is
also **not** going to tell you the right thing. Instead, run `libcamera-hello --list`.
With my Raspberry Pi Camera V2.1 module connected, I see this output:

```
$ libcamera-hello --list
Available cameras
-----------------
0 : imx219 [3280x2464 10-bit] (/base/soc/i2c0mux/i2c@1/imx219@10)
    Modes: 'SBGGR10_CSI2P' : 640x480 [30.00 fps - (65535, 65535)/65535x65535 crop]
                             1640x1232 [30.00 fps - (65535, 65535)/65535x65535 crop]
                             1920x1080 [30.00 fps - (65535, 65535)/65535x65535 crop]
                             3280x2464 [30.00 fps - (65535, 65535)/65535x65535 crop]
           'SBGGR8' : 640x480 [30.00 fps - (65535, 65535)/65535x65535 crop]
                      1640x1232 [30.00 fps - (65535, 65535)/65535x65535 crop]
                      1920x1080 [30.00 fps - (65535, 65535)/65535x65535 crop]
                      3280x2464 [30.00 fps - (65535, 65535)/65535x65535 crop]
```

Another thing you can try running is `libcamera-jpeg -o image.jpg` to save a jpeg
of the view from the camera.

### Installing MotionEye

I mostly followed
[this guide](https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-security-camera/), but had to
deviate slightly in order to get things working with libcamera. If you're
booted into a fresh Raspbian Lite install, here are the commands I ended up
running:

```
# update packages since links often break on fresh installs 
sudo apt update
# prerequisite packages
sudo apt install libcamera-tools libcamera-v4l2 python3 python3-dev python3-pip libcurl4-openssl-dev gcc libssl-dev
# ideally i'd install the other non-motioneye packages via apt install python3-<>, but I was too lazy to do so.
sudo python3 -m pip install --pre motioneye --break-system-packages
# sets up the systemd units, etc.
sudo motioneye_init
# run libcamerify (from libcamera-tools), which is an adapter to present the old v4l2 API to meyectl
sudo sed -i 's/ExecStart=/ExecStart=\/usr\/bin\/libcamerify /' /etc/systemd/system/motioneye.service
# motioneye_init starts the motioneye daemon by default, we need to restart it to pick up the change.
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo service motioneye restart
```

Once you navigate to port 8765 of your Pi, you should see the
MotionEye interface. Default login credentials are `admin` and no password.

You might see multiple options for your camera (in my case, I had many options
named `/base/soc/i2c0mux/i2c@1/imx219@10`).
I picked the first one and this ended up being (the virtualized) `/dev/video0`,
which was correct.

That's it! If you're following along at home, good luck, and hope this helped.