CatxFish

obs-v4l2sink

C++2020–2021

CatxFish / obs-v4l2sink · Archived

obs-v4l2sink

obs studio output plugin for Video4Linux2 device

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939GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

obs studio output plugin for Video4Linux2 device

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

v4l2loopback/v4l2loopback · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

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HN mentions by month10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-02-10 15:20:24 UTC to 2021-08-31 05:18:17 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
Feb 2020	2020-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Mar 2020	2020-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Apr 2020	2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
May 2020	2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jun 2020	2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	3
Jul 2020	2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Aug 2020	2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Sep 2020	2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Oct 2020	2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Nov 2020	2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Dec 2020	2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jan 2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Feb 2021	2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 2021	2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 2021	2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 2021	2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jun 2021	2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 2021	2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 2021	2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

10 sources

Anunayj·Aug 31, 2021

well the easiest way I can think of is just using the OBS virtual camera thing (Unsure if they released it officially on Linux, but there is a plugin for that [1]). Use chroma key to remove the background and add a video there, possibly on a loop. [1]. https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink

In Show HN: Blur Webcam Background on Linux

Jnr·Nov 25, 2020

On Linux I use obs-v4l2sink https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink On Windows I have tried OBS VirtualCam https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/ Both of them work very close to real time for me. Maybe your computer lacks hardware acceleration?

In Mmhmm

joecot·Jul 9, 2020

If you're looking to do this without OS X, or you want to do something like this in an existing Video conference app like Zoom or Jitsi (I have no idea if Mmhmm does or not, they give few details and I can't download it), this is pretty easy to do in OBS Studio. You can do video capture of your presentation, yourself, have background images, and arrange things however you'd like. Here's a Youtube tutorial [1] with some examples. You'd then need a virtual webcam plugin to use your OBS Studio stream in other software. On Windows you can use OBS Virtual Cam[2], on Linux you can use obs-v4l2sink[3]. On OS X I think there's still an open bounty for a OBS Studio webcam solution, so since Mmmhmm is only available on OS X anyway that might be a better solution for you. It certainly seems like Mmmhmm makes this easier, and allows you to smoothly t

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ransition from one format to another, but OBS Studio is very workable as well, and works on more platforms. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hk7W9ECtpZE 2. https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/ 3. https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink

In Mmhmm turns your boring Zoom call into a Weekend Update-style TV show

dodgepong·Jun 19, 2020

To be frank, it could definitely use help in terms of both engineers and donors. OBS's userbase has grown from roughly 500k daily users at the beginning of March 2020 to more than 1.4 million today (on Windows -- I don't have numbers for Mac or Linux). The project only has one full-time developer, and he's frequently stretched pretty thin between developing major features, reviewing pull requests, reviewing RFCs, and having calls with industry members. Unfortunately the nature of such a complex project (both in terms of functionality and technology) is that it's hard to find people qualified to work on it who aren't already dedicated to some other project. More community contribution from skilled engineers would absolutely be welcome. For example: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-browser/issues/219 and https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l

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2sink/issues/56 And on the subject of donors, it's tough to be able to appropriately compensate contributors without some amount of stability of income. OBS accepts donations primarily though Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/obsproject), and while there's a good amount in the bank, it's not being replaced as quickly as the project might need in order to properly fund developers at the level it needs to in the long term. A broader donor base would certainly help bring the stability needed to support that sort of effort. And you make an excellent point with the lockdown. Now's an awkward time to want to raise funds for the project with so many people struggling financially. In fact, it's probably reasonable to say that OBS's usage has increased so much specifically due to the fact that it doesn't require anyone to pay for it, so it's less likely that the people who use it are able to help fund it. I will say that there are efforts underway to hopefully address some of the systemic shortcomings that the OBS team has in terms of funding and development bandwidth, but things still move slowly when built on the back of a largely-volunteer workforce.

In Show HN: OBS-web – Control OBS from the browser

p4bl0·Jun 4, 2020

It is also possible to use the OBS output as a virtual webcam. All you need is v4l2loopback and the v4l2sink OBS plugin: https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink It work perfectly and the virtual camera can be used with Jitsi, BigBlueButton and the likes :).

In OBS (macOS) Virtual Camera

tobias2014·Jun 4, 2020

Or you can use the obs v4l2loopback plugin to replace steps 5 and 6: https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink

In OBS (macOS) Virtual Camera

morsch·Apr 10, 2020

Has anyone got any ideas how to achieve this? Yes. Thanks for giving me a reason to write this up. 1. Download and install OBS. OBS will be your video processor; among other things it's super easy to make it capture the whole screen or individual windows. 2. Install the v4l2 loopback kernel module[1]. This makes it possible to have a virtual webcam. On Ubuntu 19.10, this was as easy as apt install v4l2loopback-dkms and then modprobe v4l2loopback. 3. Install the OBS plugin obs-v4l2sink[5]. This exports the OBS output to the new virtual webcam device. I just installed the deb file provided by the project[2]. In OBS, under Tools, select v4l2sink and Start. That's all I had to do. Surprisingly straightforward. At least Chrome and Firefox[3] will now pick up a "Dummy Video Device" webcam that streams the window, or whatever scene I set up in O

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BS. In my case, the primary advantage was that this virtual webcam is streamed in Jitsi Meet at a higher quality/framerate than the regular desktop share feature. It's also much lower latency than both Twitch and Youtube Live streaming (Jitsi Meet/WebRTC: <1s, Twitch: 5s, Youtube: 15s[4]; YMMV). You also get to enjoy the rich feature set OBS provides for Twitch streams; for one thing, you can include the real webcam video. Bonus: Desktop audio "just worked" in Firefox, which offers the pulseaudio monitor (loopback) device as an input. Chrome doesn't -- probably the intended behaviour. I'm sure there's a workaround. [1] https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback [2] https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink/releases [3] For some reason, Gnome's Cheese won't [4] Microsoft's Mixer allegedly has super-low-latency streaming (FTL protocol), but new account are cleared manually and I haven't had the chance to try [5] For Windows, you can use OBS Virtualcam https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.539/

In Open-Source Virtual Background

ZiiS·Apr 10, 2020

Really good write up of a flexable approch. If you just want an easy greenscreen https://obsproject.com/ has a very good chromakey filter and a V4L2loopback plugin https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink

In Open-Source Virtual Background

johnnyL1337·Mar 25, 2020

Not a hardware solution but it's being talked about today, I wonder if using OBS to capture the video and outputting it to v4l2 loopback with https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink and reading it in zoom that way would be better. Just a thought, hope this helps.

In Ask HN: Good USB camera for remote work with good Linux compatibility?

jnwatson·Feb 10, 2020

Here are my rough notes. mkdir -p ~/src cd ~/src sudo add-apt-repository ppa:obsproject/obs-studio sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install obs-studio sudo apt install qtbase5-dev git clone --recursive https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio.git git clone https://github.com/CatxFish/obs-v4l2sink.git cd obs-v4l2sink mkdir build && cd build cmake -DLIBOBS_INCLUDE_DIR="../../obs-studio/libobs" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr .. make -j4 sudo make install cd ../.. git clone https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback.git cd v4l2loopback/ sudo apt install libelf-dev make sudo make install sudo depmod -a ls /dev/video* sudo modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 video_nr=9 ls /dev/video* You should see a video9 Open OBS Tools menu -> V4L2 Video Ou

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tput (It will look really squished, but you only have to do this once) Path to V4L2 Device: enter /dev/video9 Hit Start button, close window In Sources pane near lower left, hit the "+" button, then Video Capture Device (V4L2) In new dialog, select your actual webcam (not the new device) In resolution, select 1920 x 1080 Now you can test: hit the "Start Recording" button in lower right.

In Webcam, Lights, and Audio for Remote Work, Podcasting, Videos, and Streaming