How to enable camera in Morphbrowser

Severin

I have an Aquaris M10 FHD, and it says at ubports devices, the camera works in the Morph browser. But I cannot allow the use of the camera. In settings - privacy & permissions is a section camera and microphone. But there is no button for activation. And I can't get it started.

How do I fix that?

dobey

The devices page only says that the camera works for photo and video. It doesn't distinguish between what apps may work with the camera hardware. As it happens, the browser cannot use the camera on any Android based device running UT, as Android devices use a camera service rather than providing traditional video4linux support.

In order to get the camera to work, someone would have to take the time to develop a bridge to the Android HAL's camera service by providing a v4l compatible device interface on the Ubuntu Touch side.

Luksus

@dobey I thought the main issue was the trust-store, that it is not possible to grant access for Morph/WebEngine: https://github.com/ubports/trust-store/pull/18

kugiigi

@luksus I think that issue only applies on the microphone as it already work on devices with apparmor issues.

dobey

@luksus No, that's a separate issue. Audio does go through pulseaudio already in QtWebEngine, so microphone can be used, but camera on Android based devices is done via a Qt plug-in which talks to the Android HAL via libhybris, however video/camera support in QtWebEngine does not go through QtMultimedia, therefore it does not use that plug-in. Instead, it expects v4l devices, and QtWebEngine itself has no knowledge of what libhybris is or how to use it.

Therefore, someone needs to do the work to write a system service which bridges the Android HAL for CameraService as v4l compatible device on the Ubuntu side of things, so that apps using v4l for camera access will just work.