How to Write on a Virtual Webcam in Linux

How to write on a virtual webcam in Linux?

Well, actually this is possible. A quick and dirty way to do this is to use WebcamStudio.
That will create a new video device (e.g., /device/video2) that other programs see as a normal video device and can take its input from desktop, so you just set it up to capture a part of the screen that OpenCV's output is shown there.

A better but more technical way is to use the V4L2 loop back module. This way you can simply pipe the output of OpenCV to the module which is seen as a regular video device by the other programs. See the readme at the bottom of this page:
https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback
and the wiki page:
https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback/wiki
for more information.

Hope that helps.

Sending a webcam input to zoom using a recorded clip

Apparently, there are two types of /dev/video* files. One for the metadata and the other is for the actual stream from the webcam. Creating a virtual device of the same type as the stream in the /dev directory did result in Zoom recognizing it as an independent webcam, even without creating its metadata file. I did finally achieve what I wanted, but I used OBS Studio virtual camera feature that was added after update 26.0.1, and it is working perfectly so far.

Using v4l2loopback virtual cam with google-chrome or chromium on linux while having real webcam in use

Answering my own post to flag it "answered".

How to write/pipe to a virtual webcam created by V4L2loopback module?

I have found an answer in the old V4L2loopback module's page on Google code.

http://code.google.com/p/v4l2loopback/source/browse/test.c

newer link: https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback/blob/master/examples/test.c

This has helped me so far just to write to the device.

How to make a virtual camera with python?

This may be late but check this out pyvirtualcam

install it first:

pip install pyvirtualcam

You can make it like this:

import pyvirtualcam
import numpy as np

with pyvirtualcam.Camera(width=1280, height=720, fps=30) as cam:
    while True:
        frame = np.zeros((cam.height, cam.width, 4), np.uint8) # RGBA
        frame[:,:,:3] = cam.frames_sent % 255 # grayscale animation
        frame[:,:,3] = 255
        cam.send(frame)
        cam.sleep_until_next_frame()
        cam.sleep_until_next_frame()

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