A native, cross-platform control panel for the settings your webcam actually exposes.
Preview the image, tune hardware controls, save profiles, discover which process has the camera open, and automate everything from a companion CLI.
Features · Quick start · CLI · Build · Contributing
Many webcam applications show the video but hide the camera's hardware controls. Webcam Settings talks to the native camera API on each operating system, discovers the controls supported by the connected device, and presents only those controls. There is no virtual camera, streaming pipeline, account, telemetry, or background service.
- Native camera discovery and low-latency preview through Qt Multimedia.
- Dynamic integer, Boolean, menu, button, standard, and vendor control discovery.
- Hardware zoom, exposure, focus, white balance, brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness, and every compatible control reported by the device.
- Windows extended camera controls for automatic framing, digital crop/window, field-of-view presets, stabilization, HDR, focus priority, and supported effects.
- Set-and-read-back verification reports the value the camera actually accepted.
- Manual and automatic modes with immediate application.
- Human-readable
.webcam.jsonprofiles for backup and repeatable restoration. - Optional periodic reapply for software that resets camera values.
- Camera-user detection and an explicitly confirmed process-ending action.
- Script-friendly CLI with text and JSON output.
- DPI-correct, frame-backed preview and automated UI screenshots.
Ready-to-run packages are published on the GitHub Releases page:
WebcamSettings-Windows-x64.zipWebcamSettings-Linux-x64.tar.gzWebcamSettings-macOS.zipSHA256SUMS.txtfor download verification
Extract the archive for your platform and launch webcam-settings. The Windows
package includes the required Qt runtime, so it can be run without installing Qt.
Run the desktop application, select a camera, and move a supported control. Changes are applied directly to the physical webcam and are immediately visible to other applications using it.
# Windows packaged build
.\dist\bin\webcam-settings.exe
# Inspect the same camera from a terminal
.\dist\bin\webcam-settings-cli.exe controls --device UGREENIf another program owns the video stream, the preview switches to a clear busy state while hardware controls remain available. The Camera use row identifies the process where the operating system permits it. End process… always asks for confirmation because terminating an application can discard unsaved work.
Tip
For the UGREEN FineCam 4K CM973, zoom values around 150–200 are a useful
starting point when the default field of view captures too much of the room.
| Platform | Native backend | Hardware controls | Camera-user detection |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows 10/11 | DirectShow + Media Foundation fallback | Standard controls plus supported KSPROPERTYSETID_ExtendedCameraControl features |
Camera privacy activity plus the running process list |
| Linux | Video4Linux2 + PipeWire device bridge | Full VIDIOC_QUERY_EXT_CTRL enumeration, including vendor/menu/Boolean controls |
Processes holding the selected /dev/video* device |
| macOS | AVFoundation through Qt | Camera discovery and preview; physical UVC settings are hidden | Not exposed by AVFoundation |
Unsupported hardware controls are hidden rather than simulated. macOS intentionally offers preview without physical controls because its AVFoundation API does not expose the zoom, focus, or general vendor UVC settings available on iOS. On Windows, privacy activity identifies webcam capability use but does not reveal which physical camera was opened on a multi-camera system.
Windows extended features depend on both the Windows version and camera driver.
Digital-window crop controls only work while the driver has an active stream, as
required by the Windows camera API. The Linux PipeWire bridge maps PipeWire camera
nodes back to their V4L2 device when pw-dump is available; hardware changes still
use V4L2 because PipeWire does not define a portable UVC-settings protocol.
The CLI selects an UGREEN camera by default when one is connected. Pass
--device <name-or-id-substring> to choose a different device and --json where
machine-readable output is needed.
| Task | Command |
|---|---|
| List cameras | webcam-settings-cli devices |
| List formats | webcam-settings-cli formats --device UGREEN |
| Inspect controls | webcam-settings-cli controls --device UGREEN |
| Find camera users | webcam-settings-cli users --device UGREEN |
| Change controls | webcam-settings-cli set zoom=175 brightness=128 --device UGREEN |
| Set Boolean/menu controls | webcam-settings-cli set focus-auto=on exposure-auto=1 --device UGREEN |
| Enable automatic modes | webcam-settings-cli set focus=auto exposure=auto --device UGREEN |
| Save a profile | webcam-settings-cli save before.webcam.json --device UGREEN |
| Restore a profile | webcam-settings-cli restore before.webcam.json --device UGREEN |
| End a process | webcam-settings-cli terminate 1234 --yes |
Control IDs come from controls; unknown Linux controls use stable IDs such as
v4l2:0x009a0920. Boolean values accept on/off, and menu values accept either
their numeric value or displayed label. Values are validated, clamped, aligned,
written, and read back from the device. restore returns a nonzero exit code if
any control fails. Process
termination requires --yes; without it, the CLI refuses the operation.
Example JSON output
{
"device": "UGREEN FineCam 4K CM973",
"users": [
{
"pid": 20040,
"name": "obs64",
"executable": "C:\\Program Files\\obs-studio\\bin\\64bit\\obs64.exe",
"detail": "Windows camera privacy activity"
}
]
}- CMake 3.24 or newer
- A C++20 compiler
- Qt 6.5 or newer with Core, Gui, Widgets, and Multimedia
- Windows: Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop C++ workload
- Linux: V4L2 headers, normally supplied by
linux-libc-dev - macOS: Xcode command-line tools
Configure Qt through CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH or Qt6_DIR, then build and test:
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path/to/Qt/6.x/compiler
cmake --build build --config Release
ctest --test-dir build -C Release --output-on-failure
cmake --install build --config Release --prefix distWindows: install a project-local Qt SDK
py -m pip install --user aqtinstall
py -m aqt install-qt windows desktop 6.8.3 win64_msvc2022_64 `
-O .deps/Qt -m qtmultimedia
cmake -S . -B build -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 `
-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="$PWD/.deps/Qt/6.8.3/msvc2022_64"
cmake --build build --config Release
ctest --test-dir build -C Release --output-on-failureOn macOS, the generated application bundle includes the camera permission text. Allow camera access when prompted on first launch.
The GUI can capture itself after camera discovery and exit, which is useful for UI regression checks:
webcam-settings --screenshot screenshot.pngWebcam Settings is under active development. The core GUI, native control backends, profiles, camera-user inspection, CLI, packaging, and automated tests are working. Bug reports, device compatibility findings, documentation improvements, and focused pull requests are welcome.
Version tags matching v* are built automatically on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
After all packages succeed, the release workflow publishes the archives and their
SHA-256 checksums to GitHub Releases.
- Fork the repository and create a focused branch.
- Keep platform-specific behavior behind the existing backend interfaces.
- Build the project and run
ctest --test-dir build -C Release --output-on-failure. - Describe the camera model and operating system used for hardware testing.
- Open a pull request with a concise explanation and screenshots for UI changes.
Please never include private camera frames, machine-specific paths, or saved profiles containing sensitive data in an issue or pull request.
This project was inspired by Patrick Belanger's MIT-licensed SeriousWebcamSettings. It brings similar ideas—supported webcam controls, profiles, and periodic reapplication—to an independent cross-platform C++/Qt implementation. No AForge, WPF, C#, artwork, or binary code from the reference project is included; see NOTICE.md.
Webcamoid was reviewed as prior art for capability coverage. No Webcamoid source, algorithms, assets, or plugin architecture were copied. The dynamic descriptors and native backends here are an independent implementation based on the public Windows SDK, Linux V4L2 API, Qt API, and PipeWire node metadata.
Distributed under the MIT License.