The growing image-processor unpleasantness

PipeWire already has libcamera support, and we've successfully tested it with integration in Chromium's webrtc code base to placing a video call on an Intel IPU3-based device. The webrtc integration has been developed by Michael Olbrich from Pengutronix and submitted for review (see https://webrtc-review.googlesource.com/c/src/+/261620, I'm not sure it's the very latest version though, I haven't followed that development too closely myself).

The LD_PRELOAD trick is still useful in some cases (and it is implemented and has been tested with Firefox), but it is not what most systems should use. I expect desktop Linux to use libcamera through portals and PipeWire. For some more advanced use cases the GStreamer libcamerasrc element could also be useful on the desktop, but will probably see most of its uses in embedded devices. Direct usage of the libcamera API is also possible for specialized applications, and of course Android devices will go through the libcamera's Android camera HAL implementation.

libcamera suffers from the common problem in the free software world of documentation lagging behind code. We need to update the camera stack description. Apologies about that.