I want to capture a single image from my webcam and save it to disk. I want to do this in Java or Python (preferably Java). I want something that will work on both 64-bit Win7 and 32-bit Linux.
EDIT: I use Python 3.x, not 2.x
Because everywhere else I see this question asked people manage to get confused, I'm going to state a few things explicitly:
EDIT2: I was able to get Froyo's pygame example working on Linux using Python 2.7 and pygame 1.9.1. the pygame.camera.camera_list() call didn't work, but it was unnecessary for the rest of the example. However, I had to call cam.set_controls() (for which you can find the documentation here http://www.pygame.org/docs/ref/camera.html) to up the brightness so I could actually see anything in the image I captured.
Also, I need to call the cam.get_image() and pygame.image.save() methods three times before the image I supposedly took on the first pair of calls actually gets saved. They appeared to be stuck in a weird buffer. Basically, instead of calling cam.get_image() once, I had to call it three times every single time I wanted to capture an image. Then and only then did I call pygame.image.save().
Unfortunately, as stated below, pygame.camera is only supported on Linux. I still don't have a solution for Windows.
On windows it is easy to interact with your webcam with pygame:
from VideoCapture import Device
cam = Device()
cam.saveSnapshot('image.jpg')
I haven't tried using pygame on linux (all my linux boxen are servers without X), but this link might be helpful http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/capturing-frames-from-a-webcam-on-linux