Choose camera in multi-camera mobile devices

[mjk-gh]

Please let people choose from a list of all available cameras on a
multiple-camera mobile device.

Example of an open-source camera app that has this ability: OpenCamera:

https://opencamera.sourceforge.io/
(Available on F-Droid)

It can also determine if a camera is a front- or back-camera. As of 1.48.1,
it has 1 flip front/back icon (alas, it doesn't remember which back camera
was selected last) and directly above that icon, it has another icon, which
enables you to cycle through all availble back-cameras (or probably front-
cameras, if you had multiple of those and were in front-camera mode) by
pressing it shortly. One of my back-cameras gets listed under 2 different IDs,
but I can live with such a small bug.

Suggestion:

Add one icon to the main screen, between the camera on/off icon and the
overflow menu (3 vertical dots); I think there should be just enough space
left to press all buttons comfortably, even on devices with a smaller screen.
Short-pressing this new icon acts as "toggle camera between (last selected)
front-camera and (last selected) back-camera", while long-pressing it opens
a list of cameras for the current mode (front or back), with their name (if
available) and their IDs, e.g.

3: Back camera, ultra-wide
4: Back camera, normal
5: Back camera, tele
6: Back camera, <unknown>

and if in front-camera mode, the list would look similar:

1: Front camera, normal
2: Front camera, eye lash mites analysis mode

Thanks for your consideration!

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[rananajam1]

Hey @mjk-gh did you find a solution for this?

[mjk-gh]

Alas, not yet; version 20.3.2 of Jitsi still doesn't seem to let the user choose all cameras.

As soon as I find some time, I am going to (re-)visit

• Riot
• Jami
• Wire

and check out their video conferencing practicability, including selection of cameras.

If you don't mind giving away your telephone number, you could also try "Signal".

[rananajam1]

Wonderful. Thanks man @mjk-gh

[mjk-gh]

Just tried to narrow down how OpenCamera selects different cameras
and hoped that I could give some hints to the Jitsi developers on how
to copy the appropriate code and/or algorithm from OpenCamera.

Alas, it seems that while OpenCamera uses the official Android
APIs android.hardware.camera and android.hardware.camera2,
Jitsi Meet /claims/ to use android.hardware.camera in their
Manifest file, but instead uses ... I don't know, I could not identify
it, it's all some JavaScript black magic.

I hope one of these days someone takes pity on us "poor" :-} multi-
camera users, because the default non-wide-angle back camera
picked on my phone is really annoying. :-/

Also: Why is toggling between back and front camera not on a
button/icon (be it short-tap or long-tap), but in an extra popup
under "More options ..."? Maybe I should open an extra issue
for that ...