Access to the front and rear cameras simultaneously on Samsung Galaxy devices

Question

I know this question has been asked before, but it has been a long time. Asking this question again to collect new hacks / thoughts / approaches.

I need to access the front and rear cameras at the same time.

So far, I have tried implementing using the Android Camera API ( Jens Dual Camera ) and Camera API2. Both versions work perfectly on devices that have hardware support (Dual Image Signal Processors) for the dual camera function. I tested and both versions work fine on HTC one M8 (Snapdragon 801) and Xiaomi Mi4 (Snapdragon 801).

Both versions do not work on the Samsung s6, although the hardware (Exynos 7420 has a dual ISP). In addition, the default camera app on the S6 supports dual camera mode.

Any ideas / advice on this?

Thanks in advance.

Update: 11/18/2015 → I tried using the Samsung Galaxy Camera SDK , but still no luck.

Answer 1

I had to implement the same thing in a previous project. I know the fight, and I know how much code you need to write to make this work. Especially with Google providing two apis cameras (camera and camera2).

Despite the fact that I worked on some devices (such as HTC M8), which basically had two image processors (for accessing both cameras at the same time), I had problems with Samsung devices that used this function in their applications for own camera.

Then I turned around and found out that Samsung provides various special APIs for its "very special" OS. This means that for every special feature Samsung has (like a fingerprint sensor, S-pen, and soooo), they provide an API for developers to work with.

I found the SCamera API on my site here . They also provide very good documentation, and this is normal to implement.

The question you need to ask yourself is: is it really worth integrating another camera API into your application to make this work on Samsung devices as well? Keep in mind that the share of Samsung devices is really high.

My advice? Try to implement it in another project and see how this happens. If you earn it in a decent amount of time, and it is not very difficult, then integrate it into your main project.

Hope this helps you. Have a great day and good luck!