Mobian can now take photos!

Mobian is one of my favorite operating systems for the PinePhone right now, and now it's even better.

Before today, if you wanted to take a picture with the PinePhone, it was not a fun time. You would either be forced to use something like V4L2, or do some weird media-ctl ffmpeg command line stuff that I don't understand. But now, taking a photo with the PinePhone is very easy thanks to Mobian.

Today the Mobian developer, a-wai posted a thread onto the PinePhone forum saying that Mobian now allows photos to be taken. He was able to do this using some new patches implemented by megi to the Pine64 kernel. Photos can now be taken using an experimental build of GNOME Camera, and the experience looks good.

Now, before you run towards your shelf or drawer, grab your PinePhone, and flash Mobian, keep in mind this is still very experimental, and is basically glorified tech demo at it's current state.

"This is far from perfect, and should be regarded as some kind of 'technology preview': image resolution is 720p only, and the quality is really poor atm. Still, I believe this is a major step forward!" a-wai stated on the Pine64 forums.

So this is supposed to be a preview of whats to come in the future of PinePhone software.

Now that Mobian can take photos, other OSes should be able to take photos very soon using the new kernel patches. So, you should be able to take a photo soon on the PinePhone no matter what OS you are using :P.

I haven't been able to get this work myself yet. When I tried, I got a black screen in the camera app, and now I can't login to Mobian. Other users have also been reporting similar issues on the Pine64 forums. I'm going to keep trying to get it working, and when I do, I'm going to take some photos using the new PinePhone camera software to test it out. So stay tuned for that :D.

Overall, I am very excited for this new feature, I am very excited to see this working better on Mobian, and I am looking forward to seeing it on other operating systems.

UPDATE: I got the camera working and I took some photos. You can view them here.

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