How to mock a picture in Android Emulator Camera?

Question

Is there a way to set a static picture as the photo been taken by the emulator camera? I would like to test ir with zxing barcode reader on emulator.

Answer 1

If you are running the emulator on linux you can create a mock webcam showing an image (e.g. QRcode) with v4l2loopback and gstreamer.

Install v4l2loopback:

$ wget https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback/archive/master.zip
$ unzip master.zip
$ cd v4l2loopback
$ make
$ sudo make install

Check how many cameras you already have (I only had /dev/video0) and init the next one:

$ sudo modprobe v4l2loopback video_nr=1 card_label="mockCam"

Stream an image (for example a QR from googlecharts) to the mockCam. This requres :

$ wget "https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=600x340&cht=qr&chl=testing" -O qr.png
$ gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=qr.png ! pngdec ! freeze ! v4l2sink device=/dev/video1

You can check if your mock camera is picked up by the emulator:

$ ./emulator -avd yourAVD -webcam-list

If so, you can start the emulator with the mock webcam:

$ ./emulator -avd yourAVD -camera-back webcam1

You can also change the AVD setting to webcam1. Hope this helps.