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Show HN: Nikon DSLR as video conf webcam on Mac

2 points by dognotdog ↗ HN
I've spent the COVID weekends working on an open-source plugin to use my Nikon DSLR as a webcam for the endless Zoom calls, and here it is:

https://github.com/dognotdog/ptpwebcam

7 comments

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jamesponddotco
Nice!

If anyone is looking for an alternative to use your DSLR on Linux as a webcam, I wrote Fujicam[1] recently. It is not anywhere near as polished as dognotdog's implementation — it is just a wrapper around v4l2loopback, libgphoto2, and ffmpeg, really —, but has been working pretty well for me.

Despite the name, it should work with any camera compatible with libgphoto[2], not just Fujifilm cameras. Maybe I should remove it from my dotfiles, give it its own repository, and polish it a little.

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/dotfiles/tree/master/.loca...

[2] http://gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php

dognotdog
Very nice, definitely give it it's own repo!

I would've gone with libgphoto2, too, if the Mac didn't already have all this half-baked PTP infrastructure in place, and if libgphoto2 would've been easier to integrate into the CoreMediaIO pipeline.

jamesponddotco
For macOS I would probably use the official drives that Fujifilm released — less hacky, for sure —, but it does not look like Canon released something similar.

You should probably ping the guys at PetaPixel[1] to get it out there, as I am sure a lot of people would benefit from this.

[1] https://petapixel.com/contact/

dognotdog
Canon does have something, but it does have problems. E.g., it cannot get around the Library Validation problem with Zoom and Skype (they tell you it can't be used with those, which isn't quite true), plus you cannot change camera settings while running it.
jamesponddotco
> plus you cannot change camera settings while running it

Same goes for libgphoto, and Fujifilm's own implementation, by the way.

dognotdog
That is interesting. It might be a semantic difference between actually recording a movie stream via PTP, vs. using Live View, which is what I am doing. Libgphoto2 seems to support both, but I haven't tried the former, as the setup seemed more complicated, whereas Nikon's LiveView just gives you a plain JPEG when you request a frame. Even though it's only VGA resolution in the case of my camera, it beats the "HD" of the builtin webcam by a long shot.