Loopback: using hydra like a fake webcam

[rektide]

Hello! Hello hello!

Is there any way to make Hydra look like a webcam on a computer? Hydra is such cool tech, & it's such a great tool to be able to play with media over. It'd be wonderful if it could be "fed" back in to other programs running on the computer, such that I could use Hydra to output to my video conferencing system, or to my streaming system.

This would probably be operating system dependent. I happen to be on Linux. I feel like there's probably some gstreamer pipeline I could launch from the command line that could make this happen, but it's not my domain. I'll try to report back to this thread with what I find. It'd be lovely if others had resources or ideas or knew how to make Hydra "loopback" like this.

[rektide]

Just ran into this tweet, on a new Snapchat "snapcamera" feature that so functions like an effect-applying loopback device.

Snapchat filters for EVERY video conferencing app on your computer via virtual camera!

https://mobile.twitter.com/seidtgeist/status/1240338210984808450

Loopback ftw!

[yhancik]

On Windows, there's a Virtual Camera plugin for OBS that works rather well (honestly better than most virtual cameras I've tried in the past)

Webcamoid is the only multiplatform solution I know, but on Windows I found it extremely unstable.

[ojack]

Hi, I would love this, but haven't found a way. I couldn't get webcamoid to work on my computer (Linux). Snap camera looks great but doesn't run on LInux?

[yhancik]

The only other loopback solution I'm aware of is https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback .. but it only creates virtual devices, so you'd have to handle the capture (or any other way to stream to that device) yourself. Apparently you can use GStreamer for that https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback/wiki/GStreamer
(never tried though)

[rektide]

specifically the Desktop Capture As Producer section has the gst-launch to try. when creating a v4l2loopback device, you'll get a new /dev/videoX device (or 4). adjust the last pipeline element device= parameter to point to that new device:

gst-launch-1.0 -v ximagesrc startx=1 starty=1 endx=320 endy=240 \
  ! videoconvert \
  ! "video/x-raw,format=YUY2" \
  ! v4l2sink device=/dev/video1