RDK-C : RDK Integrating libcamera into PipeWire

Why libcamera in PipeWire?

• Standardized interface: Libcamera provides a unified and standardized interface for interacting with different types of camera devices. By integrating libcamera into pipewire, camera applications can use a single API to access and control camera hardware.
• Flexibility and modularity: Pipewire is designed to be a modular multimedia framework. 
• Improved performance: Libcamera is designed to provide better performance and lower latency than previous camera APIs for Linux-based systems.
• Cross-platform compatibility: Both libcamera and pipewire are open-source projects that can run on a variety of Linux-based platforms.
• Integrating libcamera into pipewire helps to simplify and streamline the process of working with camera devices on Linux-based systems.

Architecture PipeWire-libcamera.

Integration of RDKC with PipeWire-libcamera

PipeWire overview and Flow in RDK-C

• It can create audio and video server
• Apps and devices are represented by node
• Each node has the input and output port to share media between node
• The session manager is to configure nodes, ports and linking nodes
• SPA: It will link to the driver to control the driver parameter and send and receive media.
• SPA plugins: libcamera, ALSA, v4l2, JACK and etc...
• WebRTC Live Streaming- Can View from Web Application
• RMS live streaming with RTSP protocol – Can View live streaming in VLC
• CVR with KVS SDK – Can view/record data in AWS KVS service
• Session manager will control these app nodes and ports and it will link nodes along with ports for communication
• Used libcamera SPA to fetch data from the v4l2 driver

Overview of PipeWire