Linux Fu: Fake Webcams, GUI Edition

June 3, 2026 by Al Williams 5 Comments

Previously, I looked at using the Linux video loopback system from the command line. The basic trick was simple enough: capture video from a real camera, process it with something like ffmpeg, and write the result to a fake camera device via the v4l2loopback device. Then a browser, or any camera-enabled software, sees the fake camera as if it were real. This allows you to manipulate video before sending it to the rest of the world.

That works, and for those of us who like command lines, it’s easy enough to execute. But not everyone loves the command line. In the comments, there was another obvious answer: use OBS Studio.

While OBS is excellent, it is also a bit like using a laser to chop a carrot. If you already use OBS, fine. If you only want to crop a webcam, add an effect, mirror an image, or feed a virtual camera, it can feel like a lot. If you must have a GUI, you can try Webcamoid, which sits somewhere between a simple webcam viewer and a full video production system.

Webcamoid gives you a GUI for selecting a camera, applying effects, and sending the result to a virtual camera. Conceptually, it is much closer to the command-line loopback setup from the previous post than to OBS. You are still building a pipeline from input camera to output camera, but now you can do much of it with buttons and menus instead of shell commands.

That’s in theory, of course. Implementing Webcamoid turned out to be quite the exercise. Granted, this probably varies depending on where you install software. If your distro has a clean working copy of Webcamoid and its dependencies, good for you. For everyone else, keep reading.

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Linux Fu: Fake Webcams Have Many Uses

May 28, 2026 by Al Williams 14 Comments

Dealing with text streams is a fundamental skill for the Linux power user. You can sort, merge, and search text files easily from the command line. What if you could do the same thing with video? Well, you can. Maybe you want to add a logo to a webcam feed before sending it to a conference app. Maybe you want to blur, color-correct, or annotate video in real time. Or perhaps you want to inject prerecorded video into Zoom while pretending it is a live camera. Linux can do all of this, and the key ingredient is usually the same: a loopback video device.

The basic idea is simple. Instead of an application reading directly from /dev/video0, you create a fake camera device using the v4l2loopback kernel module. Your software pipeline writes processed video into the fake camera, and applications read from it as if it were a normal webcam. The result is surprisingly powerful.

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Hacked Video File Holds Multiple Films On YouTube

May 10, 2026 by Tyler August 22 Comments

We notice there are a lot of hacks on YouTube lately, but we don’t share enough hacks about YouTube. That’s why [PortalRunner]’s latest oeuvre is interesting: it’s a video that gives you a different picture depending on the selected bitrate.

Watch it at 1080p, you get one thing; at 360p, the image is completely different. The hack relies on understanding precisely how YouTube cuts down videos — because if you haven’t uploaded a video there before, you might not know the creator doesn’t have to encode all of those options; they’re invited to upload in the highest possible definition, and YouTube reencodes the rest.

1080p and 720p films are shown at 60FPS, while 360p and below are 30FPS– so that’s one way to hide the difference. Since YouTube drops every second frame when encoding the lower-quality video, images you want in the HD version can be kept only in even-numbered frames that YouTube will remove. That seems easy enough, but how does [PortalRunner] avoid the low-quality image flickering in at 30 FPS when watching in higher definition?

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Testing Severely Neglected VHS Tapes And CDs

March 25, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Check your tape for spider nests before rewinding. (Credit: Brady Brandwood, YouTube)

Physical media has a certain amount of durability associated with it, a quality which is naturally determined by the way that they’re stored. Generally this does not involve being abandoned on the porch of a dilapidated, abandoned house where the elements and any passing critter can have their way with it.

Exactly how playable would these VHS tapes and CDs still be? Whether it was out of a sense of burning curiosity, or for a similar reason that [Brady Brandwood] has a habit of adopting former seafood critters like lobsters as adorable pets, these items got recently collected and put to the test.

Normally VHS tapes are kept safely in a little sleeve or box in a dry, cool place, similar to CDs and DVDs. These particular items had however been left for at least a decade out in the open amidst the ransacked remains of abandoned homes. This meant that the VHS tapes were full of dirt and debris, and at least in one case with a spider nest that jammed up the thrift-store VHS/DVD combo player.

The CDs were cleaned and tried in a G5 iMac, with the obvious results there being that as long as the shiny layer with the data was intact, they worked fine. While a damaged disc tried to play somewhat, even the amazing audio CD error-correcting algorithms can not compensate for see-through gashes.

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This is an image that would have been difficult to chroma key by hand.

CorridorKey Is What You Get When Artists Make AI Tools

March 18, 2026 by Tyler August 57 Comments

You may not have noticed, but so-called “artificial intelligence” is slightly controversial in the arts world. Illustrators, graphics artists, visual effects (VFX) professionals — anybody who pushes pixels around are the sort of people you’d expect to hate and fear the machines that trained on stolen work to replace them. So, when we heard in a recent video that [Niko] of Corridor Digital had released an AI VFX tool, we were interested. What does it look like when the artist is the one coding the AI?

It looks amazing, both visually and conceptually. Conceptually, because it takes one of the most annoying parts of the VFX pipeline — cleaning up chroma key footage — and automates it so the artists in front of the screen can get to the fun parts of the job. That’s exactly what a tool should do: not do the job for them, but enable them to enjoy doing it, or do it better. It looks amazing visually, because as you can see in the embedded video, it works very, very well.

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The Tragic Demise Of The Technirama Prism-Based Anamorphic Lens

March 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

A commercial Delrama prism-based anamorphic lens for large cameras. (Source: Mathieu Stern, YouTube)

Although to the average person a camera lens is just that bit of glass you stick on the front of the camera to make stuff appear in focus, there’s a whole wide world out there of lens designs and modifications with enough variety to make your head spin. Some of these designs make a big impact, while others fade away again, sometimes at the whims of film makers and photographers. Prism-based anamorphic lenses are an oddity that recently [Mathieu Stern] got his hands on. (Video, embedded below.)

During the 1950s and 1960s there was a bit of a competition between anamorphic formats, which use special lenses that ‘squeeze’ a larger image so that widescreen movies could be recorded on standard 35 mm film. By using the same lens for recording and playback, the result was a mostly distortion-free image. Here the Technirama format by Technicolor who teamed up with Dutch company De Oude Delft (‘Old Delft’) to produce the prism-based Delrama lenses that fit on existing lenses for cameras and projectors.

The last gasp of the Delrama anamorphic lenses. (Credit: Mathieu Stern, YouTube)a

Despite having a clearly superior, distortion-free image than the cylindrical lenses of the competition, Technirama got pushed out of the commercial market, leaving De Oude Delft to try and interest the consumer market for Delrama with 8 and 16 mm adapters. These latter are the ones that [Mathieu] got his hands on and tried out with a DSLR camera.

Troublesome with these Delrama adapters is that their silver mirrors tend to degrade over time, and they also turned out to be rather fragile, which are both things that made consumers sour on them. Another challenge was the fixed four meter focus that’s great when you’re using it with a projector, but terrible for up-close shots. All of these issues resulted in Delrama fading from the market by the 1970s until all that remains are these remnants of a format that once was used to film some of the biggest Hollywood movies.

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Running Video Through A Guitar Effects Pedal

March 4, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 1 Comment

Guitar pedals are designed to take in a sound signal, do fun stuff to it, and then spit it out to your amplifier where it hopefully impresses other people. However, [Liam Taylor] decided to see what would happen if you fed video through a guitar pedal instead.

The device under test is a Boss ME-50 multi-effects unit. It’s capable of serving up a wide range of effects, from delay to chorus to reverb, along with compression and distortion and a smattering of others. [Liam] hooked up the composite video output from an old Sony camcorder from the 2000s to a 3.5 mm audio jack, and plugged it straight into the auxiliary input of the ME-50 (notably, not the main guitar input of the device).

The multi-effects pedal isn’t meant to work with an analog video signal, but it can pass it through and do weird things to it regardless. Using the volume pedal on the ME-50 puts weird lines on the signal, while using a wah effect makes everything a little wobbly. [Liam] then steps through a whole range of others, like ring modulation, octave effects, and reverb, all of which do different weird things to the visuals. Particularly fun are some of the periodic effects which create predictable variation to the signal. True to its name, the distortion effect did a particularly good job of messing things up overall.

It’s a fun experiment, and recalls us of some of the fantastic analog video synths of years past. Video after the break.

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