Keeping Up With Camera Frame Rate In Tkinter GUI

My goal is to display a real time feed from a USB camera in a Tkinter Window. My problem is that I can't seem to update the GUI fast enough to keep up with the frame rate of the ca

Solution 1:

I'm posting this as an answer inspired by @stovfl's comment on the question, but I'm still curious to see how other people would approach this.

His comment pointed out that my frame_queue probably cannot deliver frames when calling frame_queue.get() within 1 millisecond, so I just removed the queue from the GUI update code entirely. Instead, I call the GUI updating code from the callback directly. Here is the new code:

import tkinter as tk
from PIL import ImageTk, Image
import uvclite
import io

user_check = True

def frame_callback(in_frame, user):
    global user_check
    if user_check:
        print("User id: %d" % user)
        user_check = False
    img = ImageTk.PhotoImage(Image.open(io.BytesIO(in_frame.data)))
    panel.configure(image=img)
    panel.image = img

if __name__ == "__main__":

    with uvclite.UVCContext() as context:
        cap_dev = context.find_device()
        cap_dev.set_callback(frame_callback, 12345)
        cap_dev.open()
        cap_dev.start_streaming()

        window = tk.Tk()
        window.title("Join")
        window.geometry("300x300")
        window.configure(background="grey")
        panel = tk.Label(window)
        panel.pack(side="bottom", fill="both", expand="yes")

        window.mainloop()
        print("Exiting...")
        cap_dev.stop_streaming()
        print("Closing..")
        cap_dev.close()
        print("Clear Context")

This works quite well, and the GUI is very responsive and captures motion in real time. I'm not going to mark this as an answer just yet, I would like to see what other people come up with first.