Earlier this year, my colleagues Julian Bouzas and George Kiagiadakis wrote about PipeWire and Wireplumber, the PipeWire session manager. Since then, PipeWire has continued to evolve with the recent integration of libcamera, a library to support complex cameras. In this blog post, I'll explain why libcamera exists, what it does, and how we integrated it in PipeWire.

libcamera

Cameras are complex devices which require heavy hardware image processing. The complexity in the userspace camera application development originates with the evolution of complex hardware. libcamera addresses this problem and offers ease of camera application development. libcamera can be described as a full camera stack library in the userspace to provide the feature that do not belong in the kernel.

The core of libcamera framework exposes kernel driver APIs to userspace while the libcamera application layer abstracts the developer from complex hardware usage. libcamera supports multiple video streams from a single device. In real time use cases such as video conferencing, we may need to preview streams with different resolutions than what we tend to stream over the network. It is natural that we would like to display the live streaming simaultaneously while we capture the video with different resolutions. libcamera offers a perfect solution to fulfill these requirements.

Having said that, what if we'd like to stream a camera device data using different applications simaultaneously? Well, PipeWire answers this question. Besides acting as an interface between hardware devices and applications, PipeWire eases the sharing of hardware devices between applications. Moreover, integration of libcamera into PipeWire brings all the abilities offered by libcamera into PipeWire. With this, PipeWire can become a first class user of modern cameras.

PipeWire-libcamera interworking

As camera application development through v4l becomes more and more complex, Collabora decided to tackle this by integrating libcamera into PipeWire to offer all the evolutions coming from both the frameworks.

The integration work has been merged into PipeWire master.

Give it a try!

Please follow the steps below to try libcamera in PipeWire.

1. Make sure that the linux kernel version is 5.0.0 or above.
2. Make sure that the system user is added to video group to access /dev/media*. You can run the command sudo adduser `whoami` video and restart the session.
3. Make sure that meson build package is installed in your system.
4. Make sure that sdl2 package is installed in your system.
5. Make sure that libdrm package is installed in your system.
6. Follow Getting libcamera to obtain the source and install it. You can also use the commands below to build and install.

   meson --prefix <path/to/install dir> --buildtype=plain build
   cd build
   ninja -C . install
   

7. Follow Getting PipeWire to obtain the source. Configure with meson and install it. Use the following commands:

   meson --prefix <path/to/install dir> -Dlibcamera=true build
   cd build
   ninja -C . install
   

8. Now you can test libcamera spa plugin. Run the command "./build/spa/examples/local-libcamera" from the PipeWire directory. You should be able to see the camera captured data being rendered.

We will be blogging more about this integration work and improvements to be made in the future, explaining the motivation and further progress we make. Stay tuned!