Open Source Summit Europe 2022

libcamera has been maturing since it's first announcement at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh, and is now used by platforms including the Raspberry Pi, Rockchip, NXP and the Intel IPU3. The conversion from V4L2 to the libcamera API has required applications to face updates that they weren't necessarily expecting. In this talk, we look at some current applications that utilise cameras, and how to ensure they will work well with libcamera platforms, or what to do if you find your application which used to work on a legacy V4L2 camera stack, now has a libcamera requirement. We will look at how desktop camera integration can be handled with PipeWire and the XDG camera portal, providing a layer of security on top of libcamera, and the provision of multiple applications being able to access the camera simultaneously, and what that will mean for applications, and users. We'll also look at the expanding ways that applications can access cameras on these platforms, using the libcamera native API, GStreamer element, Python bindings, or the V4L2 adaptation layer wrapper 'libcamerify', and what extra development is needed on those layers.