Fedora Status Update and PipeWire Camera Support in Firefox
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Fedora Community Blog: Infra & RelEng Update – Week 47 2023
This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. It also contain updates for CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team as the CPE initiatives are in most cases tied to I&R work.
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Jan Grulich: PipeWire Camera Support in Firefox #2
I wrote the first blog post about PipeWire cameras in Firefox in May and a lot has happened since then. The first PipeWire support arrived shortly after the blog post was published and was released as part of Firefox 116 (August). We didn’t enable it by default, of course since it’s still a “work in progress”, but many of you tried it (thank you for that) and we were able to fix some issues that I, as the only tester at the time, hadn’t found. However, aside from all the crashes and minor issues we were able to fix relatively quickly, there was one major problem (or drawback) with the PipeWire camera that made it unusable with most popular video conferencing sites, such as Surveillance Giant Google Meet. Kind of a deal breaker, right? This has kept me busy ever since, but we are finally close to fixing it in upstream. I’m going to explain why this was a problem and how we fixed it, and forgive me in advance if I write anything wrong, I’m still learning and discovering things as they unfold.