1322151 - Android support for UVC/v4l2 devices with getUserMedia and the MediaDevices API

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Audio/Video, defect, P3)

Description

[brad]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.99 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Use any `getUserMedia()` and/or MediaDevices API test, such as https://webrtc.github.io/samples/src/content/devices/input-output/, on Android.  I've tried two Galaxy S4 devices with different versions of Android, and a Galaxy S6.  Have a standard UVC USB video device attached (such as the Logitech C920 webcam).


Actual results:

Front/back cameras on the device are available to the web page, but the UVC device is not.


Expected results:

It would be a very nice feature to have UVC devices available to web pages.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Gian is this expected behavior?

Comment 2

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

This is expected behavior in the sense that the WebRTC code only supports devices available via the Android Cameras API. I don't even see any guarantee that V4L/UVC can be depended on being available in any Android version or is in any way an official API. If Android supports V4L/UVC Cameras officially at some point I would expect it to expose them via the Cameras API as well, at which point they'll work in Firefox for Android.

We might take patches for this but I doubt we'll do any effort whatsoever in supporting it.

Comment 3

[Blake Wu [:bwu][:blakewu]]

mchiang,
I would think this is a "nice-to-have" feature. Does Android/Chrome support this? What do you think?

Comment 4

[brad]

Not to speak for mchiang, but I do agree that this would be a nice-to-have feature.  It's not critical, but would bring Firefox Android to feature parity with Firefox Desktop in this area.

Chrome on Android does not support this functionality to date.  I intend to submit a similar feature request there if I can figure out where to do it.  I came to Firefox first as Firefox has always typically been ahead of Chrome on media functionality.

Comment 5

[Munro Mengjue Chiang [:mchiang] Be Mozillian since 1/19/2018]

Just wondering how many android devices kernel have fully support V4L/UVC.
Since V4L/UVC is not mandatory for Android, it is depending on each OEM's implementation.
For security reason, v4l2 driver access may be limited to mediaserver process.
That would be a problem too.

Comment 6

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.