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Comment by extesy | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how to implement a virtual webcam in python on MacOS? I want to implement something like zoom's background replacement but I can't find a way to represent the output as a webcam that can be used as an input by various conferencing apps.

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CamTwist lets you make custom effects and has an SDK[0], you may be able to interface it with Python using PyObjC[1].

It also has direct script functionality but I think the SDK is more powerful.

[0]: http://camtwiststudio.com/developers-objective-c/ [1]: https://pyobjc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

A while ago I used OBS and Python+OpenCV to do a goofy webcam where I'd had my face replaced by David Bowie's -- not using deep learning though, just "plain old" face detection+landmarking+morphing.

OBS: https://obsproject.com/es

Now I know it can be done, but I'm not sure how things have changed (this has been some 3 or 4 years ago), so I can't really give you too many details other than it's possible.

This is definitely not optimal and would be a overkill setup, but OBS Studio + VirtualCam plugin let's you basically screencapture anything and turn it into a webcam device. So if your python app can display a video feed, you can capture the window and show it as webcam (with OBS as overhead).

VirtualCam is not available on MacOS.

Don’t know about python, but Snap Camera lets you develop your own filters, and takes care of all the virtual device stuff for you.

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