Hardware specifics

IPU 7 webcam

This follows along the Guide on the ArchWiki for a specific laptop model.

Before starting, you’ll want to install libcamera-tools to check whether the situation has improved in the meantime:

yay -S libcamera-tools

You can use:

cam -l
qcam

for testing things.

If this does not show something useful (see the Guide on the ArchWiki, install DKMS and kernel headers so DKMS can be used:

yay -S dkms linux-lts-headers linux-headers

Then, install Intel Vision Drivers (DKMS) from AUR:

yay -S intel-vision-drivers-dkms-git

Finally, create /etc/modules-load.d/intel_cvs.conf with content:

intel_cvs

and run, just to be safe:

mkinitcpio -P

and reboot. The commands from above should work now, you should see a camera picture with non-ideal quality.

Now, install the tooling necessary to use the camera in actual applications.

yay -S gst-plugin-libcamera pipewire-libcamera

Restart user-level pipewire service afterwards:

systemctl restart --user pipewire

In Firefox, set media.webrtc.camera.allow-pipewire in about:config to True. In Chromium, set enable-webrtc-pipewire-camerainchrome://flags/`. Both browsers need a restart for things to work.

Sadly, I am currently still getting segmentation faults of Pipewire and also when trying:

gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc ! video/x-raw,format=RGBA,width=1920,height=1080,framerate=30/1 ! videoconvert ! ximagesink

but for example qcam works.