CamSimulate: Python app to stream Videos from files to video devices on computer | Hacker News Reader

CamSimulate: Python app to stream Videos from files to video devices on computer

github.com

35 pointsthunderbong6 comments

    ffmpeg_command = f"ffmpeg -re -i {input_file} -f v4l2 {selected_device}"
    stdscr.clear()
    stdscr.addstr(0, 0, f"Running command: {ffmpeg_command}")
    stdscr.refresh()
    subprocess.call(ffmpeg_command.split())

No. Just, no.

    subprocess.call(["ffmpeg", "-re", "-i", input_file, "-f", "v4l2", selected_device])

Is how you spell that in a way that won't immediately break with a file name with a space in it.

I think it's nice that some kid or novice has figured out how to do something cool and decided to package it in a way that they think others might find useful. For those of us who need it, we can discover the ffmpeg call and use that directly. Others will think this is very trivial and not worth mentioning and yet others will see it as a revelation. That's okay, we're all at different stages.

I don't want to come off as overly harsh, but calling this "Virtual Camera for Linux written in Python" seems a bit too generous considering all this seems to do is ask you for an input file and an output device and then call `ffmpeg -re -i {input_file} -f v4l2 {selected_device}`. Cool idea though, I didn't know you can do this that easily with ffmpeg.

Yeh it's a neat script but not really much more.

I use a similar trick + gphoto to use my digital camera as a webcam, works great even on my old hardware:

    gphoto2 --stdout --capture-movie | ffmpeg -i - -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video10

I'd sometimes use my Android phone as a webcam by running an app like "IP Webcam" that exposes a video stream of the camera feed and then using the video stream as input for ffmpeg.

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