News
17th November 2011. 15:48

Camera libraries available for Sony Ericsson phones

As promised when we announced our support of independent developers, we have now made the camera library binaries for a number of Sony Ericsson phones available under a special end user license agreement (EULA). You can use these camera libraries to handle the camera hardware in our 2011 Xperia™ phones except Xperia™ PLAY, which has a different camera module.

Download and find out more after the jump.

As we stated a while back, we recognise custom ROMs as an important part of the Android™ ecosystem. When we decided to support the FreeXperia group working on the custom ROMs for Sony Ericsson phones, we quickly found out they had problems with our cameras. This is because the camera technology used by Sony Ericsson is a very advanced – we actually consider it to be the best in the market. However it is a closed implementation, so we can’t share the source code for it.

However, after some discussions with the FreeXperia team, we agreed to allow the FreeXperia team to use our libraries (which can be seen as drivers) for the cameras. But these libraries could not be used as they were, since they had dependencies to other modules in the phone that could not be included in the custom ROM project. To solve this, we rebuilt the libraries and provided them with a special EULA.

These newly rebuilt camera libraries are now modified with less dependencies to other libraries. We have recompiled the libraries without code changes but with different build flags. You can use these camera libraries under a special EULA-license. There are several important conditions you need to comply with, for example:

The Software can be copied and distributed under the condition that the original copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty will stay intact and the Licensee will not charge money or fees for the Software, whether as a stand-alone product, or as part of a compilation or anthology.

Several more conditions apply – please read the full EULA and make sure you are complying before using the camera libraries in any software. Download the camera libraries and find the full EULA text in the zip. Here you can also find a short instruction on how to start using these libraries. For more information on how use libraries like these, please see the FreeXperia project related thread on the XDA forum. We don’t have any possibilities in providing further support on this.

At last but not least, we want to say thanks to all of you in the community supporting this work, we really appreciate it. Even though we might not be able to support every single request we get, we are doing our best to support the community going forward.

Karl-Johan Dahlström
Head of Developer Relations
Sony Ericsson

More information

•  Download the camera libraries for the 2011 Xperia phones.
• Find out how Sony Ericsson is supporting independent developers.
• Learn how to build a Linux kernel.
• Read why we made it possible to unlock the boot loader.
• Visit our unlock boot loader web service.