Firefox 116 Should Have Experimental PipeWire Camera Support

[Nuc!eoN]

What is the benefit of native pipewire support? Pipewire seems to be backwards compatible and 'just work' in the existing ecosystem aleady.

[jacob]

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

It already is on Fedora.

[jacob]

What is the benefit of native pipewire support? Pipewire seems to be backwards compatible and 'just work' in the existing ecosystem aleady.

That's for audio. Even so, there are benefits of pure pipewire, like a more modern API.

[Almindor]

While I don't doubt pipewire is a step in the right direction I have the bad luck of having a creative webcam that doesn't work with it. It's usb and the microphone produces garbled output with pipewire.

It's a SW bug in pipewire howerver as it works fine with pulseaudio. At this point I also know it's not "other hw/sw" combo issue as I replaced the original computer I used this with a steam deck and same issue there. If I mask pipewire service and install pulseaudio it works there too.

[Quackdoc]

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

kinda, I don't know of any dedicated applications but you can use gstreamer, below is an example cmdline that can produce a pipewire output that can be consumed by pipewire applications. as well as a consumer for pipewire streams(I just happened to have it saved). you could easily take this and add filtering to it instead. by consuming a pipewire input, filtering it via gstreamer, then outputting it as a new pipewire stream

gst-launch-1.0 videotestsrc is-live=true ! video/x-raw,format=YUY2,framerate=30/1 ! identity drop-allocation=true ! pipewiresink stream-properties="p,node.description=test_out,node.name=test_out,media.class=Video/Source" mode=provide sync=false  ​

gst-launch-1.0 pipewiresrc target-object=test_out ! videoconvert ! xvimagesink  ​

What is the benefit of native pipewire support? Pipewire seems to be backwards compatible and 'just work' in the existing ecosystem aleady.

aside from what I mentioned about v4l2loopback, libcamera support is a major feature, currently you would emulate a v4l2 camera by launching firefox with pw-v4l2, but that is very buggy

[sarmad]

How will I benefit from this as an end user? Can I, for example, use some WipeWire plugins to apply effects on the video stream before it reaches Firefox?

[ChristianSchaller]

How will I benefit from this as an end user? Can I, for example, use some WipeWire plugins to apply effects on the video stream before it reaches Firefox?

While there is no such apps atm for video I expect them to appear once the browsers and OBS Studio supports PipeWire camera handling. For audio there are apps like EasyEffects and I expect people to start playing with making video applications along the same lines. So this story covers Firefox, but Chrome is also coming soon with Pipewire camera support and work is underway to land the Pipewire camera support in OBS Studio leading up to the August release.

[Danny3]

Cool!
But now I wonder when will Firefox automatically detect and enable its Wayland support when running in a Wayland session on Gnome or KDE Plasma?
How hard it could be to detect a Wayland session and enable support for it?

[Leinad]

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

It is already in terms for video support. Some major distros don't use it for audio support yet. For audio support the missing distros will switch probably with next major versions (I guess Mint 22, Leap 15.6 or 16.0, ...)

[MorrisS.]

It is already in terms for video support. Some major distros don't use it for audio support yet. For audio support the missing distros will switch probably with next major versions (I guess Mint 22, Leap 15.6 or 16.0, ...)

What about KDe neon? According to your statement, it seems that Ubuntu 22.04 has applied pipewire partially. in the same way, I assume distros based on the same Ubuntu release.