Use portal to request access to camera

[marbetschar]

... instead of the --device=all flag. Eventually fixes https://github.com/elementary/camera/issues/234 - however, I don't know how to effectively use the camera after the access was granted.

After access was granted, we should somehow provide the device to gstreamer so we are able to use it around here: https://github.com/elementary/camera/blob/portal/access_camera/src/Widgets/CameraView.vala#L121-L123

Anyone an idea?

[danirabbit]

I saw this the other day when trying to find more information about porting to Gtk4. Maybe relevant? Here he’s using Pipewire: https://blog.gtk.org/2020/05/20/media-in-gtk-4/

[Marukesu]

After access was granted, we should somehow provide the device to gstreamer https://github.com/elementary/camera/blob/portal/access_camera/src/Widgets/CameraView.vala#L121-L123

I believe this snippet has what you want.

basically, i would drop the Gst.DeviceMonitor code, since we can't enumerate devices without --device=all, and make create_pipeline() accept the fd instead of a Gst.Device.

AFAIK, the camera portal means an hard dependency in pipewire 0.3 in the host and runtime, and camera would only work in systems with pipewire 0.3 installed.

[marbetschar]

Thanks guys! I started playing around with it and now getting the below error. It probably makes more sense to finish the Gtk4 port first, so we then can use the new APIs instead of investing more time into legacy stuff:

(io.elementary.camera:2): libportal-DEBUG: 10:18:47.076: Calling AccessCamera
** (io.elementary.camera:2): DEBUG: 10:18:47.284: CameraView.vala:115: access_granted: true
** (io.elementary.camera:2): DEBUG: 10:18:47.286: CameraView.vala:122: camera_fd:  19

** (io.elementary.camera:2): WARNING **: 10:19:17.586: CameraView.vala:200: Unexpected error from pipeline: Internal data stream error.

PS: Had to install the gstreamer1.0-pipewire plugin to get things "working". So we might want to ship this by default at some point.

[Be-ing]

FWIW the camera portal may be deprecated soon(ish).