Status of videochat in UT

rocket2nfinity

Is videochat still broken in UT? It appears to be, but if not, then what apps/webapps/services work?

AppLee

@rocket2nfinity
Still not available.
And I think you won't miss the news when it will be available.

dobey

No, it is not broken, but one must create a native app to use it.

It won't be usable in browser anytime soon, because QtWebEngine developers are not working on replacing the multimedia support and camera access from Chromium with QtMultimedia/QtCamera back-ends, and Android devices do not use v4l.

However, assuming trust prompt support gets fixed for Wayland, and the browser asks for permissions to use camera/mic, then on devices using upstream Linux kernel such as Pinephone and Librem 5, should be able to have working video chat in browser, since those devices should expose the camera through v4l.

rocket2nfinity

@dobey Any apps currently functional for any social media?

ImmyChan

@rocket2nfinity Depends what you mean by "functional for any social media"

If you mean to browse social media generally then there are lots of great apps, I for example use uMastonauts for Mastodon and Pesbuk for those rare times I need Facebook, there are many more apps than that of course

rocket2nfinity

@ImmyChan I mean specifically functioning videochat

AppLee

@rocket2nfinity
No webapp is able to access the camera as Dobey just explained.

In a possible future, something might work,

assuming trust prompt support gets fixed for Wayland, and the browser asks for permissions to use camera/mic

And it will only be for devices using upstream kernel and camera exposed as V4L.

Josele13

Is there a possible solution for devices using android drivers?

regards....

AppLee

@Josele13
Yes, to create a native app.

And that's not an easy task. Contributors are welcome to help add this feature to Fluffychat or Teleports

Josele13

@AppLee Fluffychat is an option, in Telegram you can not because it does not allow video calls, you can send a short video recording,

thank you very much...

rocket2nfinity

@AppLee Above my digital paygrade. But, I can contribute $ to a pool to hire someone who can....

poVoq

FluffyChat aka Matrix is probably not possible either as Matrix just wraps Jitsi Meet and that is a WebRTC app.

I think the easiest would be to port the Mumble app. It is already made in desktop qt5 and uses native but audio only communication.

But how about Anbox? Does it allow camera access?

AppLee

@poVoq said in Status of videochat in UT:

But how about Anbox? Does it allow camera access?

AFAIK Anbox has only access to the network.
I don't know how we could translate and toggle permissions from android to UT ; I don't think this is possible.

dobey

@poVoq said in Status of videochat in UT:

FluffyChat aka Matrix is probably not possible either as Matrix just wraps Jitsi Meet and that is a WebRTC app.

WebRTC is only a protocol. It does not necessarily require a browser to implement it.

@poVoq said in Status of videochat in UT:

But how about Anbox? Does it allow camera access?

No, it cannot access camera or mic, and is not hardware accelerated. And nobody is currently working on this either.

rocket2nfinity

I'm curious, could libertine be used to provide V4L and camera access?

dobey

@rocket2nfinity said in Status of videochat in UT:

I'm curious, could libertine be used to provide V4L and camera access?

No. Libertine is not a VM. It doesn't change how the drivers work, nor device access. On Android based devices, camera access must go through the HAL.

One could theoretically build a tool to translate v4l access through the Android HAL, but it would be a significant amount of work, may affect performance, and is fairly complex. I don't think anyone is working on such a thing.

rocket2nfinity

Maybe some of these ideas will help?

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=209121

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/droidcam/

Apparently there is a group already working on a solution to access the camera from the android HAL and present it to Linux:

"provides a set of interfaces to libcamera for existing applications; they will include a V4L compatibility layer, an Android HAL interface, and a GStreamer interface. The intent is to make libcamera suitable for all Linux-based devices." https://lwn.net/Articles/794555/

https://libcamera.org/docs.html