Firefox 116 Should Have Experimental PipeWire Camera Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 116 Should Have Experimental PipeWire Camera Support

Mozilla's Firefox 116 web-browser should have experimental PipeWire camera capturing support available for Linux users...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-116-PipeWire-Camera

[MorrisS.]

When pipewire is set to be default on the main Linux OSes?

[andyprough]

Will Mozilla do a tease with this experimental feature, like with jpeg-xl, only to yank it back away from the users again?

[Quackdoc]

the best part about pipewire video stuff is being able to avoid using v4l2loopback.

EDIT: I really hope they make a tool for controlling camera at a pipewire level (gain zoom etc), it's a massive pain right now

[patrick1946]

When pipewire is set to be default on the main Linux OSes?

I think Fedora is pipewire and it works for me very well.

[pharmasolin]

When pipewire is set to be default on the main Linux OSes?

Define what's main Linux OSes. Steam deck I believe use pipewire, Ubuntu as well, Fedora as mentioned above, Arch(?) Pipewire is here

[Vermilion]

When pipewire is set to be default on the main Linux OSes?

Pretty sure it's already the default in Fedora, Ubuntu, Pop, RHEL 9 and the latest Debian with GNOME.

Edit: And Tumbleweed!

[klapaucius]

the best part about pipewire video stuff is being able to avoid using v4l2loopback.

EDIT: I really hope they make a tool for controlling camera at a pipewire level (gain zoom etc), it's a massive pain right now

I'm curious: why would avoiding v4l2loopback be a good thing?

[Quackdoc]

I'm curious: why would avoiding v4l2loopback be a good thing?

v4l2loopback is a kernel driver, this poses both potential security and convince issues. for security this is probably of very minor concern but in general if you don't need it to be in the kernel, it probably shouldn't be. as for convince there are a couple bullet points

• needing to modprobe the driver (a hassle, even more so if you upgraded kernels)
• support, while v4l2loopback works fine in general, it is a dkms in the majority of distros, which can present a small bag of worms
• pipewire video is a lot more unified with things like pixel format, this can hopefully avoid some odd issues that can pop up when using video sharing
• multiple sink/source, with v4l2loopback you need new "devices" for every sink/source with pipewire you don't need to worry about that

there are a couple of other features but none of the top of my head.

[caligula]

v4l2loopback is a kernel driver, this poses both potential security and convince issues. for security this is probably of very minor concern but in general if you don't need it to be in the kernel, it probably shouldn't be.

Are there some filter applications for pipewire video? How does it work?