P
As you might already know, I'm currently making GStreamer-droid works properly in Ubuntu Touch as a replacement for qtubuntu-camera. This will make video recording works for Halium 7.1 based port, as otherwise a set of custom patches on the Android side (which isn't easy to backport) is required.
How can you test this out?
If you're interested in testing this out, please follow these instructions:
Halium-side preparation
There's a custom patch for droidmedia (the underlying Android lib that powers GStreamer-droid) that you need to apply to prevent a crash. This patch is in the process of upstreaming, so soon you won't have to do this.
To apply the patch to your tree, change directory to <Halium source root>/halium/droidmedia and run:
git fetch https://github.com/peat-psuwit/droidmedia fix-raw-data && git cherry-pick FETCH_HEAD
You might need to do this again if you run repo sync.
Install GStreamer-droid
Make sure you're running the latest devel or edge channel image. If you're interested in testing video recording too, please make sure that audio for your port works correctly.
Run sudo umount /lib/udev/rules.d/70-android.rules. This prevents failure in the following step.
Run sudo ubports-qa xenial_-_gst-droid to add the repository containing the packages. UBports-qa will upgrade the already installed packages to the latest version.
Install additional packages. Run sudo mount -o remount,rw /, then sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-droid nemo-qtmultimedia-plugins.
Reboot your phone to make sure everything is in place.
After every boot, to make sure Qt will choose the correct backend, you'll need to run
sudo mount -o bind /dev/null /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5/plugins/mediaservice/libaalcamera.so
to hide qtubuntu-camera away.
Install updated camera-app
You'll also need the updated camera-app. To install, grab the binary from GitLab CI, then install with pkcon install-local --allow-untrusted <file name>.
How to debug
If things don't go as it should, you can add additional debug information by running the camera-app from the command line.
(cd /opt/click.ubuntu.com/com.ubuntu.camera/current && GST_DEBUG=4 ./camera-app --desktop_file_hint=~/.local/share/applications/com.ubuntu.camera_camera_3.1.1.desktop)
