I can log in from two different browsers simultaneously, so the state logged-in or -out in the browser should not have any influence on my trials with ffmpeg.
I gave up trying to make these work. Nothing got more than a passing clip of an image. I booted into Windows and got a little longer image before it dropped out. That was still unusable for video calls. I live in a retirement community where we are essentially locked down. That means that people are using more bandwidth than usual. That may contribute to the problem, but I doubt it. Since I have nothing to do all day, I may give it another try.
I should clarify. I can get a video feed in the browser but I have only VLC media player to accept a stream. It doesn’t work. I tried going to the Zoom test site but it tried to download an .rpm before it would test. I don’t trust Zoom, so I didn’t install that. When I was forced to use Zoom, I used an iPad and my networks guest mode. Our community bandwidth issues made it a disappointing experience.
I will not use Zoom either, but the concept I provided I am using a lot. And people notice the difference. Tested in Hangouts, Duo, Nextcloud Talk, Discord, Messenger … Also some older friends with plain desktop PCs ( sort of the same as your situation ) have told me they’re really happy with it.
I followed this meticulously, and it worked! I started VLC media player, selected the video device (which did not appear until I followed your directions) and the cam feed showed up. In the future, if I have video call, Zoom or anything else, will I find the phone as video0, or do I have to run any commands first? Separate issue: I couldn’t run kate or dolphin as root. I had to log out as user and login as root: something I do about once every year or two. Couldn’t move or copy from the cli either. This is a confession, not a request for help. I’ll check other threads for help on that.
must be run every time before one needs the camera, right? Is this the way to create a video stream that can be accessed by applications like Skype, for example, as opposed to a traditional usb camera that should normally be recognized and streamed right away after boor or activation?
Sorry if this is a dumb question, I am just no expert in Linux video.
Dumb questions don’t exist with one exception: questions that were not asked yet should have been
It is a manual operation, to get the stream started. And it should be, since the stream from the phone does eat it’s battery life. In Skype, Discord, Duo, Hangouts, you don’t have to select a stream, you select the “MyPhone Camera”. These apps will see the loopback device as just another camera. Yet the camera is completely different from a USB or internal camera, since it’s a loopback device, not a real camera. It also requires the app on the phone to be running, otherwise there is no stream. So running this from boot is something I would advice against.
A friend does use this construction though with an IP-webcam he had around and did not use anymore. Since that device only operates with a username and password, he had to add this to the URL of the camera, i.e. http://user:password@IpCamIpAddress:8080, but once the URL was OK it worked the same way.
And … sometimes things are simpler than you found. The Droicam devs have made a small linux app too, at https://dev4747apps.com . Download the zip file, unzip it to some folder, run
sudo ./install
It will build an own v4l2loopback-dc for your kernel, configure it for loading and after a reboot you’ll have
A new /dev/video loopback device
A small program in the folder you installed from called ‘droidcam’ and even ‘droidcam-cli’. The first one is nice since it lets you autofocus and zoom in/out. Provided the Droidcam app on your phone runs.
So basically the app on phone and linux are enough to get it working.
Tried this but it failed. The droidcam program fails because it can’t find the video0. It has a README file which says I need to install libjpeg-turbo which was installed. It says to look for dependencies
gtk+-2.0 libavutil-dev libswscale-dev
Which I can’t find. There are similar ones but not exact. Before I tried this, I was going to ask if I could make that text from a previous post into an executable that I could save somewhere and run instead of losing that long input text.
Would this be the same basic process for an AMCrest Security camera. Isn’t that basically an IP camera. My goal would be to use it as a webcam for conference calls, jitzi, zoom, etc. The cameras are better quality for a lower price than what I can find as a “webcam”
I’d say yes. Basically you use the URL that you can access the cam with from a browser. I know some have security features like a username and password being mandatory, But the answer to that is in the thread already.
The Droidcam got working but it was not a very satisfactory experience. During our lockdown, I did busy-work, cleaning up and organizing. I FOUND AN OLD WEBCAM!! Still not a satisfactory solution. I was able to test the Droidcam with VLC media player. However, I cannot get VLC media player to “find” this usb webcam. VLC offers options to select the cam. Having setup the Droidcam, the option /dev/video0 was available. After plugging in the usb webcam, I now have /dev/video0, /dev/video1 and /dev/video2. None of these work.
I select one of these in Advanced options and get this error for every option I select:
Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'v4l2:///dev/video1'. Check the log for details.
To add to my frustration, I had to get Zoom working for a meeting and I booted into Windows 10. During boot, I got the message “usb 2.0 cam found and ready to work.” Windows found it automatically and it worked without any settings being adjusted. So, are any of the steps Knurpht showed above useful to get this cam working? Don’t know if this is useful:
I downloaded cheese and tried each of the three options for the cam. None worked. All said “device not found” when they opened the cheese app. I saw no options or settings menu. I downloaded Zoom and tried that as well. In Settings, you have the option to pick which cam to use. The default was “my phone cam” which is what Droidcam called the phone. However, in the dropdown box, it showed “usb 2.0 webcam” but selecting it did not bring up a video.
Hope this is not too far off topic: I downloaded cheese as a test of the webcam. It came with 37 files and 15 MB. Can I get rid of ALL these files, not just the cheese app alone?
IMHO you’d better start a new thread. This USB webcam issue is different from what the original thread was about. Please include the relevant output of
