Camerax

This skill provides procedural guidance and standard patterns for building camera applications on Android, with a focus on CameraX, including its Camera2Interop utilities, and Media3 integrations.

Core workflows

Handling immutable API patterns

Various Android camera and media APIs, especially CameraX VideoCapture, use a fluent, immutable builder-like pattern where methods return a new instance. Failing to reassign these results in settings, such as audio, being ignored.

Pattern: Reassignment is required

// WRONG
run {
  val pending = recorder.prepareRecording(context, opts)
  pending.withAudioEnabled() // This returns a new instance which is ignored
  val active = pending.start(exec, listener)
}

// CORRECT
run {
  val pending = recorder.prepareRecording(context, opts)
      .withAudioEnabled() // Chaining works
  val active = pending.start(exec, listener)
}

// ALSO CORRECT
run {
  var pending = recorder.prepareRecording(context, opts)
  pending = pending.withAudioEnabled() // Reassignment
  val active = pending.start(exec, listener)
}

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See immutability for a list of affected classes.

Migrating to CameraX

When migrating legacy camera codebases to the CameraX Jetpack library:

• Camera1 to CameraX : For migrating legacy android.hardware.Camera implementations, surface handling, and manual lifecycles, see the Camera1 migration guide.
• Camera2 to CameraX : For migrating more recent but verbose android.hardware.camera2 implementations, session state callbacks, and interop patterns, see the Camera2 migration guide.

Comprehensive feature blueprinting

For multi-step features that involve multiple files and hardware-level wiring, follow the Structural Blueprinting approach to avoid system timeouts. Such complex features include: