Arch Linux

emgaron

Member

Registered: 2022-04-02

Posts: 7

No webcam/screen sharing in Chromium under Gnome/Wayland

I have a freshly installed HP X2 210 G2 convertible running with Gnome and ran into the issue that I cannot use the built-in camera with chromium (e.g. for Google Meet).

Here's what I have investigated so far:

• The camera is working - I can enable it in other applications like VLC or Firefox

• In chromium, when I go to the WebRTC test page from Mozilla (https://mozilla.github.io/webrtc-landing/gum_test.html), trying the camera just shows no reaction. When I try the same on another laptop where chromium is running under LXDE (i.e. X11 instead of Wayland), the camera works.

• I found this posting suggesting to install the (deprecated) pipewire-media-session. When I do that, screen sharing starts to work, but the camera still does not work. With wireplumber, neither camera nor screen sharing work.

• I've experimented with various flags for chromium: --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer, --ozone-platform=wayland, --enable-features=RunVideoCaptureServiceInBrowserProcess to no avail

Pipewire and xdg-portal are installed:

> pacman -Qs xdg-desktop-portal
local/xdg-desktop-portal 1.16.0-1
    Desktop integration portals for sandboxed apps
local/xdg-desktop-portal-gnome 43.1-1
    A backend implementation for xdg-desktop-portal for the GNOME desktop environment
local/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk 1.14.1-1
    A backend implementation for xdg-desktop-portal using GTK

> pacman -Qs pipewire
local/gst-plugin-pipewire 1:0.3.70-1
    Multimedia graph framework - pipewire plugin
local/helvum 0.3.4-1
    GTK patchbay for PipeWire
local/libpipewire 1:0.3.70-1
    Low-latency audio/video router and processor - client library
local/libwireplumber 0.4.14-1
    Session / policy manager implementation for PipeWire - client library
local/pipewire 1:0.3.70-1
    Low-latency audio/video router and processor
local/pipewire-alsa 1:0.3.70-1
    Low-latency audio/video router and processor - ALSA configuration
local/pipewire-audio 1:0.3.70-1
    Low-latency audio/video router and processor - Audio support
local/pipewire-v4l2 1:0.3.70-1
    Low-latency audio/video router and processor - V4L2 interceptor
local/wireplumber 0.4.14-1
    Session / policy manager implementation for PipeWire

I'm certain I'm missing something; hence, any input and pointers are welcome!

emgaron

Member

Registered: 2022-04-02

Posts: 7

Re: No webcam/screen sharing in Chromium under Gnome/Wayland

Ok, I'm one step further. Screensharing (at least according to the Mozilla test site) can be enabled by enabling the WebRTC PipeWire Support (found it here). Via commandline, it looks like this:

chromium --flag-switches-begin --enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer --flag-switches-end

Unfortunately, that does not solve the camera issue.