Webcam completely broken in Wayland on 26.04 — org.freedesktop.portal.Camera entirely missing from all packages

[scallaway]

Ubuntu Version:
26.04 LTS

Desktop Environment (if applicable):
KDE Plasma (matters not)

Problem Description:

After a recent system update, the webcam shows a black screen in all Wayland apps — Slack, Microsoft Edge, GNOME Snapshot. The camera LED turns on, indicating the device is being opened, but no frames are received.

I originally posted this on the Kubuntu Forums as that is my current installation but this appears to be a fundamental Ubuntu 26.04 issue: https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/current-supported-releases/kubuntu-26-04/692523-webcam-completely-broken-in-wayland-on-26-04-—-org-freedesktop-portal-camera-entirely-missing-from-all-packages

Current system information

OS: Kubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon) x86_64
Kernel: Linux 7.0.0-22-generic
DE: KDE Plasma 6.6.4
WM: KWin (Wayland)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (32) @ 5.88 GHz
GPU 1: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Lite Hash Rate [Discrete]
Memory: 20.38 GiB / 122.66 GiB (17%)
Disk (/): 864.51 GiB / 1.79 TiB (47%) - ext4

[peterwhite23]

Your headline says “org.freedesktop.portal.Camera entirely missing from all packages”. You won’t find it in the regular packages, because those are portals for sandboxed apps, like snaps. PipeWire/Wireplumber is a snap now and, as you may know, PipeWire handles most all multimedia these days, including access to the camera. It’s probably just some snap connection missing somewhere.

@scallaway

After a recent system update, the webcam shows a black screen in all Wayland apps

Does that mean it did work with Ubuntu 26.04 before? Or was that update actually a distribution upgrade?

[tea-for-one]

@peterwhite23

PipeWire/Wireplumber is a snap now

In Ubuntu 26.04, it’s not a snap (yet?)

apt policy pipewire
pipewire:
  Installed: 1.6.2-1ubuntu1
  Candidate: 1.6.2-1ubuntu1
  Version table:
 *** 1.6.2-1ubuntu1 500
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu resolute/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

apt policy wireplumber
wireplumber:
 Installed: 0.5.13-1ubuntu1
 Candidate: 0.5.13-1ubuntu1
 Version table:
*** 0.5.13-1ubuntu1 500
       500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu resolute/main amd64 Packages
       100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[ogra]

There is a pipewire snap in the store, but that was developed and designed for use on UbuntuCore and UbuntuCoreDesktop, I doubt it has ever been tested on a classical Ubuntu desktop install…

[peterwhite23]

Huh, that’s odd. Wasn’t there some announcement that 26.04 would ship with PipeWire as a snap? Or am I thinking of some future version?

Anyway, it’s still probably some permissions issue.

snap connect firefox:camera

should, for instance, allow Firefox access to the camera.

Or did you enable the new permissions prompting?

@ogra

There is a pipewire snap in the store, but that was developed and designed for use on UbuntuCore and UbuntuCoreDesktop, I doubt it has ever been tested on a classical Ubuntu desktop install…

Ahh, thanks for that context. Yes, I must have read something about CoreDesktop and mixed it up with plain Desktop.

[scallaway]

It hasn’t worked since I’ve upgraded to 26.x.

I was on 25.10 previously and it was working without issue.

[scallaway]

I don’t have snap installed on my system at all.

Firefox etc. is installed through flatpak instead. This was due to some hardware issues that I was experiencing with Firefox that caused major slowdowns.

If pipewire and wireplumber aren’t released as Snaps yet that won’t affect my situation anyway.

[ogra]

@scallaway

Firefox etc. is installed through flatpak instead.

Please note that we can not support flatpak applications here (we can support the flatpak binary from the archive, but not any flatpak packaged apps as these do not see any testing or integration work in the distro at all), you will have to seek support with the packager of the bowser (probably mozilla)

[scallaway]

Yep I get that, so I did a bit more digging.

Ultimately what I found out was that it was the USB controller that was the problem, rather than anything further up the chain.

dmesg during streaming showed the real cause — xhci_hcd 0000:11:00.0: ... ep 2 status 4 ... not part of TD (USB transaction errors on the isochronous video endpoint)

Simply swapping to a new USB port seemed to fix the issue. I still think this was caused by the upgrade to 26.04, but I’m not sure what bug to file.

Wanted to document it here in the event others run into the same problem.