Fedora 41 To Rely On PipeWire By Default For Firefox Camera Handling

Red Hat engineer Jan Grulich has provided an update today on PipeWire camera handling with the upcoming Fedora 41 release.

Beginning with the Fedora 41 release coming out in October, PipeWire will be the default back-end for web camera handling within the Firefox web browser. This is part of their long ongoing effort at Red Hat for improving PipeWire integration on the Linux desktop and also benefits their Intel IPU6 open-source enabling efforts for helping newer Intel laptop web cameras be supported by the upstream open-source Linux software stack.

The PipeWire camera support has matured enough to be the default for Firefox web camera handling. The gaps between the PipeWire and V4L2 backends have closed, there's also been work on libcamera and WebRTC, and other related efforts.

With Chromium 127 and later, PipeWire camera support is also available in that Google web browser but hidden behind a "PipeWire camera support" Chrome flag for the time being.

Those wanting to learn more about the current state of PipeWire camera support and the changes coming with Fedora 41, see this blog post by developer Jan Grulich.