Front camera upside down on N9/N950?

[storsjo]

I've built an application that uses the cameras on Harmattan (using gstreamer directly, not Qt Multimedia, using the subdevsrc gstreamer element). I've only got access to a N950 developer device (running firmware 1.2011.22-6_PR_RM680), and on my device, both the primary/back and secondary/front cameras work fine. (The application runs in landscape mode, and the camera picture is drawn without any rotation in this layout.)

Someone else tested the application on both a N950 and a N9, and the primary/back camera worked fine, but he said the secondary/front camera was rotated upside down on both of these devices (I haven't heard back which firmware version this was).

What difference might there be between my N950 and the tester's (and his N9), causing the front camera rotation? Is there any property I should set to avoid this, or can I get any indication of the rotation of the frames so that I can rotate them right myself? The issue is a bit tricky to debug since it all works fine on my device, and I don't see any properties related to rotation/orientation.

I tried having a look at the source of Qt Mobility Multimedia, but they don't seem to do anything special with the subdevsrc element that I don't do myself already.

[bokovoy]

On N9 front camera is at the bottom right side of the body while on N950 it is at the top right. That's the only physical difference that should be there (main camera sensors are different but front side sensors should be the same if I recall correctly). Could you make two screenshots and provide them along with a sample application that produces this effect? I can forward them to the Camera team people for closer inspection.

[weiwei2]

is QtMultimedia, with regards to camera operation, supported as similar as in Symbian^3? i find my code that works on Symbian^3 doesn't work on N950. Perhaps i shouldn't ask this in this thread. i do have my own thread at this link

[storsjo]

On N9 front camera is at the bottom right side of the body while on N950 it is at the top right. That's the only physical difference that should be there (main camera sensors are different but front side sensors should be the same if I recall correctly). Could you make two screenshots and provide them along with a sample application that produces this effect? I can forward them to the Camera team people for closer inspection.

Thanks for the quick reply!

Yes, that sounds sane, and the sensor mounting still wouldn't explain the difference where the application which runs fine on my N950 but allegedly showed the camera upside down on the tester's N950. I've still to hear back from him with more details though, and was just trying to see if there were any setting that I had overlooked.

I'll try to narrow it down to a minimal test application that behaves differently on my device and the tester's.

[storsjo]

Sorry for the fuss - there is no real issue at all, it was only miscommunication between me and the tester.

The issue was that the camera picture was drawn as-is, without any mirroring. (E.g. the same as "gst-launch subdevsrc camera-device=secondary ! video/x-raw-yuv, width=320, height=240 ! xvimagesink force-aspect-ratio=true".) If the user holds the phone in landscape mode, the picture is drawn correctly, and the user feels that everything is right. If the phone is rotated to portrait mode though, the picture on the screen actually is drawn upside down compared to the real world.

So the solution is to educate the user to hold the phone in the right way, landscape mode, and as second step, add horizontal mirroring of the picture from the front camera to make it feel more natural.

So once again, sorry for the noise, it really was a non-issue.