Use a Panasonic Lumix camera as a webcam on Linux, with live preview and remote camera control.

Panasonic's official Lumix Tether and Lumix Webcam Software are Windows/macOS only. On Linux there is no supported way to get a live video feed from a Lumix camera — even though the cameras expose a perfectly usable WiFi streaming interface.

LumixCam talks to the camera over its HTTP/CGI control API and receives the MJPEG video stream it sends via UDP. It can also read from any V4L2 device (USB capture cards, v4l2loopback, etc.), so you can switch between sources on the fly.

• Live video preview from the camera's WiFi UDP stream or any V4L2 device
• Switch between sources at runtime (keys 1/2 or click the toolbar)
• Remote shutter release (C)
• Cycle focus modes: AFS / AFC / MF (F)
• Cycle AF area modes: Tracking, 1-Area, Pinpoint, Face Detect, 23-Area, 49-Area (A)
• Click-to-focus anywhere on the preview (right-click to focus + capture)
• One-shot autofocus (O)
• Battery and battery-grip status in the overlay
• V4L2 pixel format support: MJPEG, YUYV, BGR3, YU12

• Linux (Wayland or X11)
• Rust 2024 edition (1.85+)
• A Panasonic Lumix camera with WiFi (tested with cameras that expose the cam.cgi HTTP interface)
• The camera connected to the same network as the PC (the camera's own WiFi AP works — default IP is 192.168.54.1)

cargo build --release

The binary is at target/release/lumixcam.

Connect to the camera's WiFi, then:

# Default: stream from the camera over UDP
lumixcam

# Use a V4L2 capture card instead
lumixcam --source v4l2 --video-device /dev/video2

# Custom camera IP and UDP port
lumixcam --camera-ip 192.168.1.100 --udp-port 50000

# V4L2 with specific format
lumixcam --source v4l2 --video-device /dev/video0 \
    --input-format yuyv --video-size 1280x720 --framerate 30

Click on the video to focus at that point. Right-click to focus and capture.

1. On startup, LumixCam registers with the camera over HTTP (cam.cgi) and puts it into recording mode.
2. It asks the camera to stream MJPEG video via UDP to a local port.
3. A background thread receives UDP packets, strips the proprietary header, and extracts JPEG frames.
4. The GUI (egui/eframe) renders the latest frame and overlays status information.
5. Camera commands (capture, focus, AF settings) are sent over HTTP on a separate worker thread so the UI never blocks.
6. A keepalive thread polls the camera state every few seconds to track battery level and keep the connection alive.

MIT