Re: [RFC PATCH] media: Virtual camera driver

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab]

On Sun, 01 Feb 2026 21:14:54 +0100
Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello.
> 
> On neděle 1. února 2026 21:06:49, středoevropský standardní čas Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > > There is a notable user base for v4l2-loopback. It is the defacto choice
> > > for streaming phone cams.  
> > 
> > This will then likely face the same hurdles as v4l2-loopback, the main
> > one being that camera support should be upstreamed with proper drivers
> > instead of a closed-source userspace daemon.
> > 
> > For phone cameras, the way forward upstream is libcamera. Until kernel
> > drivers for ISPs are available, the soft ISP is a stop-gap solution. It
> > recently gained GPU acceleration support (with work to improve image
> > quality with additional algorithms ongoing).  
> 
> My use-case for v4l2loopback is to stream a webcam from one machine to another (with the help of ffmpeg). Is this covered by something other than v4l2loopback now?

Using a kernel driver for something like that is a bad idea and may end
causing dead lock problems. You may also have performance issues and
high network traffic. The best solution for it is to use a proper
userspace tool, like obs:

	https://obsproject.com/kb/linux-installation

Thanks,
Mauro