Alternatives to Cheese on Ubuntu MATE Linux

For years I used the little “Cheese” app in Linux to record webcam videos. Recently, though, Cheese has gotten flaky and unreliable. That pushed me to look around for alternatives that would work with Ubuntu MATE and be installable via the Synaptic Package Manager. Here’s what I found.

Recommended Alternatives

All of these are available through Synaptic or Ubuntu’s repositories:

Guvcview – Lightweight, GTK-based, full camera controls, multiple formats (AVI, MKV, WebM). Much smoother performance than Cheese, especially with MJPEG instead of YUYV.

Webcamoid – Cross-platform, effects-rich, very user-friendly.

Kamoso – Minimalist, clean interface, easy to use.

Camorama – Supports USB and network/IP cameras, with manual image controls.

Snapshot – The newer GNOME replacement for Cheese, packaged in Ubuntu 24.04 and newer.

For screen + webcam recording combos, tools like SimpleScreenRecorder are also worth mentioning.

Guvcview: The Strongest Replacement

After trying them, I found Guvcview to be a big improvement over Cheese. Even if you could still get Cheese to work, Guvcview is more stable, smoother, and gives you more control over your video capture.

File Formats in Guvcview

One thing that surprised me: Guvcview saves video in the .mkv (Matroska) format by default. At first I thought it was .kvm or .kmv, but it’s just the standard .mkv. Linux recognizes it right away and plays it back without issues.

The key question for me was: will Kdenlive understand .mkv files? The answer is yes. Kdenlive is built on FFmpeg, and it works with MKV containers out of the box. That means you can take your Guvcview recordings and drop them directly into Kdenlive with no conversion needed.

Customizing Output

If you prefer other formats, Guvcview lets you change both the codec and the container format:

Open Guvcview → Preferences → Video.

Under Container, choose AVI, MKV, or WebM.

Under Codec, select MJPEG, H.264, VP8/VP9, etc.

That way you can save straight to .webm or .avi if you’d rather avoid MKV. But since Kdenlive handles MKV without complaint, there’s no real need to change.

Converting with FFmpeg

If you ever do want to convert existing files, FFmpeg makes it easy: