[HELP] Intel IPU6 Camera Black Screen on Dell XPS 13 Plus (9320) - Ubuntu 24.04

Ubuntu
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I am unable to get any video feed from the built-in camera. The system correctly identifies the camera as /dev/video0 through the v4l2-relayd setup. However, when I launch any application (Gnome Snapshot, Zoom, or web browsers):

  • The white camera LED indicator turns ON.
  • The application interface remains completely BLACK.
  • No error message is displayed, but no frames are captured.

All required Intel IPU6 DKMS modules and firmware seem to be loaded.

  • v4l2-relayd is active and running.
  • Pipewire is being used as the media server.
  • I have already tried adding a Pipewire passthrough rule for v4l2_input, but it did not resolve the black screen.

System Logs / Observations: When running gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! videoconvert ! autovideosink, the pipeline starts, the LED lights up, but the output window stays black or fails to receive buffers. It appears to be a negotiation failure between the IPU6 backend and the v4l2loopback output.

I am looking for advice from anyone who has managed to fix this specific “Active LED but Black Stream” issue on the XPS 9320. Is there a specific format override (NV12/YUYV) or a particular kernel parameter needed for this MIPI sensor to work on recent Ubuntu releases?

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I am unable to get any video feed from the built-in camera. The system correctly identifies the camera as /dev/video0 through the v4l2-relayd setup. However, when I launch any application (Gnome Snapshot, Zoom, or web browsers):

  • The white camera LED indicator turns ON.
  • The application interface remains completely BLACK.
  • No error message is displayed, but no frames are captured.

All required Intel IPU6 DKMS modules and firmware seem to be loaded.

  • v4l2-relayd is active and running.
  • Pipewire is being used as the media server.
  • I have already tried adding a Pipewire passthrough rule for v4l2_input, but it did not resolve the black screen.

When running gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! videoconvert ! autovideosink, the pipeline starts, the LED lights up, but the output window stays black or fails to receive buffers. It appears to be a negotiation failure between the IPU6 backend and the v4l2loopback output.

I am looking for advice from anyone who has managed to fix this specific “Active LED but Black Stream” issue on the XPS 9320. Is there a specific format override (NV12/YUYV) or a particular kernel parameter needed for this MIPI sensor to work on recent Ubuntu releases?

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Look in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntelMIPICamera

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Shouldn’t those “!” be pipes, “|” ???

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Welcome, @Fayssal8 to the community! :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi, @ericmarceau :slight_smile:

@Fayssal8 wrote:

… to which you’ve replied:

I would think that, as well, BUT apparently, according to the videoconvert documentation, the idea is indeed to use the ! (exclamation mark), as @Fayssal8 has done:

https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/videoconvertscale/videoconvert.html

From that web page:

videoconvert

Convert video frames between a great variety of video formats.

Example launch line:

 gst-launch-1.0 -v videotestsrc ! video/x-raw,format=YUY2 ! videoconvert ! autovideosink

This will output a test video (generated in YUY2 format) in a video window. If the video sink selected does not support YUY2 videoconvert will automatically convert the video to a format understood by the video sink.

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I stand corrected! Thank you, Ricardo.

Fayssal, my apologies.

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Hi everyone,

Thank you for the insights! I wanted to share how I finally got the camera working perfectly on my XPS 13 Plus 9320 running Ubuntu 24.04, as it might help others.

The issue was indeed related to the Intel IPU6 architecture which requires specific OEM drivers not included in the stock Ubuntu image. Here is the solution that worked for me (based on Dell’s official KB):

  1. Add the Dell OEM repository: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oem-solutions-engineers/oem-projects-meta
  2. Install the specific meta-package for the XPS 9320 (codename: Tentacool): sudo apt install oem-somerville-tentacool-meta
  3. Update and Upgrade: sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
  4. Power off and Restart: A complete shutdown is necessary to load the new firmware.

After these steps, the camera was immediately detected by the Snapshot app.

Hope this helps!

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Thanks for taking the time to follow up an marking this solved for anyone else having similar issues.

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@Fayssal8 since you’re the OP, can you change the title and replace [HELP] with [solved]
the green check is good but text is better.

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@pavlos I couldn’t find the option to rename it. I don’t think I have the permissions.

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if you go to the first post (which is yours) and move the mouse there, there is a pencil icon to the right of the title which should allow you to edit the title of your post from [HELP] blah blah to [solved] blah blah

I found an old post of mine, here’s a screenshot of the pencil. This allows me to change the title of that post. There must be an age limit since I cannot edit my very first post about useful aliases. @hydn might be able to help.

image

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It’s already marked with a :white_check_mark: icon. No need to edit title. The [Help] is fine it lets readers know the purpose and then the solved check mark lets them know it was solved.

Thanks for checking!

There’s a TTL by discourse (forum software for editing of topics/titles. So you would always be able to edit.

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