OBS and fake webcam

Using webapps and other programs to do video and video conferencing, we would like to use open broadcast studio to enabled editing, screen sharing and others “scenes” work.

On linux we have obs-v4l2sink. They even have a nice .deb file for installation.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work on Debian/buster. It seems that there are a path mismatch. There is an issue on github about this.

The process

1. Enable v4l2 loopback device

    apt-get install v4l2loopback-dkms
   
    modprobe v4l2loopback devices=1 video_nr=10 card_label="OBS Cam" exclusive_caps=1
   

   This creates /dev/video10 with the name “OBS Cam”. eclusive_cap=1 is needed for chromium to pick it up.

2. Download, extract and copy the plugin

    wget https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink/releases/download/0.1.0/obs-v4l2sink.deb
    dpkg -i obs-v4l2sink.deb
   
    cd /usr/lib/obs-plugins/
    ln v4l2sink.so ../../lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/obs-plugins/
   

3. In OBS, you chould now have a tools -> v4l2sink menu entry. Clicking that shows a menu where you are to write the loopback device to be used with OBS.

4. Test using e.g. vlc v4l2:///dev/video10

Other comments

A virtual camera is nice but it leaves the issue of microphone. There is a separate issues about that, which I have looked into much.