access both front and back camera simultaneously on samsung galaxy devices

Question

I know this question has been asked before but its been a long time. Asking this question again to gather any new hacks/thoughts/approaches.

I need to access both front and back camera simultaneously.

So far I have tried implementations using android camera API (Dual Camera- by Jens) and camera2 API. Both implementations work fine on devices having hardware support(Dual Image Signal Processors) for dual camera feature.I have tested and both implementations works fine on HTC one M8(Snapdragon 801) & Xiaomi Mi4(Snapdragon 801).

Both implementations fails on Samsung s6 even though it's hardware capable (Exynos 7420 has dual ISP). Also, the default camera app on S6 supports dual camera mode.

Any ideas/advice on this ?

Thanks in advance.

Update:18/11/2015 --> Tried using the Samsung Galaxy Camera SDK but still no luck.

Answer 1

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

Even though I got it working on some devices (like HTC M8) which basically had two Image Signal Processor (necessary to access both cameras at the same time), I had trouble with the Samsung devices that had this feature implemented in their native camera application.

Then I turned around and found out that Samsung provides different special APIs for its "very special" OS. What that means, is that for every special feature that Samsung has (like the finger print sensor, the S-pen, and soooo on), they provide a API for the developers to work with.

I found the SCamera API on their site here . They also provide very good documentation and it is ok to implement.

The question you need to ask yourself: is it really worth it to integrate yet another camera API in your app to make this work on Samsung devices as well? Take in consideration that the proportion of Samsung devices is really high.

My advice? Try and implement it in a different project and see how that goes. If you get it to work in a decent amount of time and it's not very complicated, then integrate it in your main project.

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