libcamera @FOSDEM 2023¶

In recent months, Jacopo has been pushing hard to get the Pine Phone Pro to have upstream support for cameras. As part of his developments he has written a talk showing and demonstrating the current progress and capabilitites.

Unfortunately, Jacopo was not able to attend FOSDEM, and so his talk was delivered by Kieran in his place.

The FOSDEM event page shares the recorded video.

Convergent camera applications for mobile Linux devices¶

What does it take to run your desktop camera application on your phone?

Linux desktop camera applications have traditionally been limited to support USB cameras preventing their usage on mobile Linux platforms with complex camera systems. With the adoption of Pipewire and libcamera traditional camera applications are not anymore limited to desktop system but can be re-used for mobile platforms.

This talks presents the implementation of the components that allow a desktop camera application to run on a mobile system, using a Pinephone Pro running PostMarketOS as development platform.

Linux desktop camera applications have historically supported only simple use cases and are generally limited to the usage of USB cameras. This has traditionally prevented their adoption on embedded and mobile devices, such as Linux smartphones, where the camera system requires precise configuration of the several components that realize it.

The increasing adoption of Pipewire as the system media device manager in conjunction with its libcamera backend that enables support for complex cameras, allows the usage of ‘traditional’ camera application in new contexts.

The talk will demo a desktop camera application such as gnome-camera or cheese running on a PinephonePro with PostMarketOS and presents the architecture and the implementation of the components that allow a ‘desktop’ camera application to run on a mobile Linux system.