Android camera access

[Lee Matthews]

Hi,

I wish to be able to access an external usb camera attached to an Android phone using gstreamer. I have already achieved this using the android version of gstreamer that uses the dynamic libraries from the command line, I was using the following pipeline :

gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video4 ! video/x-raw, framerate=20/1,width=640, height=480 !  jpegenc ! multipartmux boundary=spionisto ! tcpclientsink host=10.1.5.21 port=9999

I have looked at the android static libraries and I cannot find the video4linux2 plugin. Having done a little research it would appear that I need to use JNI to access the android.hardware.Camera API. Why is this ? Why does the video4linux2 plugin exist in its dynamic version and not in its static version for the android platform ? I'm rather lost on this.

Can anyone enlighten me ?

Thanks again.
Lee