Virtual Camera project

This project aims at creating a fake camera device, which can be used by any application like Zoom, Skype etc... but can be fed any data.

I have mostly two ideas in mind:

• replacing my camera with any video, either just of fun, or even to play a recording of me, so that I can leave my desk and fake still being here 😉
• add Snapchat-like filters

How it works

The base concept is a Linux kernel module named v4l2loopback which lets you create a virtual video device which can take data from other processes.

I would eventually like to be able to use this module's API directly, but for now the easiest way was to use a python module named virtualvideo, which uses ffmpeg to feed the video stream to the kernel.

Using it

There are several transforms defined in transform.py which transform the webcam image to whatever they want. The mode.txt file enables you to change the transform at runtime, by simply changing the first number. Run with:

python3 customCam.py

Reference

StackOverflow thread listing solutions to view /dev/video2 output, easiest being ffplay -f v4l2 /dev/video2.