Setting up droidcam and obs-studio cam in Debian

Posted on Thu 30 July 2020 in software • 1 min read •

Currently, most of the population is working from home, so having a good video conferencing setup has become important. I have setup droidcam for getting video input from phone/ipad and obs-studio for managing different audio/video source in Debian using the following steps:

  1. At first install droidcam in PC using software from here. droidcam should also be installed on phone/ipad using app store.
  2. Install obs-studio by the command sudo apt install obs-studio.

For using the output of obs-studio into video-conferencing software, obs-v4l2sink should be installed and properly configured.

  1. Install v4l2loopback kernel module by sudo apt install v4l2loopback-dkms
  2. Install deb file for obs-v4l2sink downloaded from their release page.
  3. Make a link for obs-v4l2sink plugin in right folder by sudo ln -s /usr/lib/obs-plugins/v4l2sink.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/obs-plugins/v4l2sink.so
  4. Open /etc/modprobe.d/droidcam.conf and edit it so that content looks like
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options v4l2loopback_dc width=1280 height=720 card_label="Droidcam"
options v4l2loopback width=1280 height=720 devices=1 video_nr=10 card_label="obs_studio_cam"  exclusive_caps=1
options snd-aloop enable=1,1 index=3,4
  1. Add v4l2loopback to autoload modules by editing /etc/modules-load.d/droidcam.conf, so that its content is
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videodev
v4l2loopback_dc
v4l2loopback
snd-aloop
  1. Update initramfs by sudo update-initramfs -u.
  2. Reboot the system and enjoy video output from obs-studio in your video conferencing session.

Update (20/04/2021): Camera functionality is now built into obs-studio 26.1+. Out of box, it works with almost all popular video conferencing systems. However, for skype, please limit the camera output resolution to 1280x720.