Android camera access

[Lee Matthews]

Thanks. 

Our application is extremely niche, where we will be sending the phone to the International Space Station, so I can say with absolute certainty, given the costs and time involved in space qualifying a smartphone, our target platform won't change. 

When you say that mediacodec can be easily abstracted to a new gstreamer element, how easy would it be for a noob to Java and gstreamer ? ie me ! :)

I need to try and balance the amount of time it would take to use v4l2 against writing an abstraction to android.media.MediaCodec. How easy would it be to add v4l2 to the binaries ?

Cheers
Lee


On Mo, 2014-05-26 at 10:54 +0200, Lee Matthews wrote:
> 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 ?

v4l2 is not a public API on Android, and a device might support it for
camera access or not. I guess it would make sense to include it
nonetheless in the binaries :)

However the real solution will be to use the Java API via JNI, and with
a similar approach as is used in the androidmedia plugin for
android.media.MediaCodec usage this can be abstracted quite easily into
a new GStreamer element.

-- 
Sebastian Dröge, Centricular Ltd - http://www.centricular.com
Expertise, Straight from the Source

_______________________________________________
gstreamer-devel mailing list
gstreamer-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/gstreamer-devel