 I am very excited about today's video. I for years have enjoyed videos by Arthur Reader on YouTube. He's constantly bringing to light software that I was unaware of and hardware that I was unaware of. And I reached out to him and asked if he wanted to collab on a video. So enjoy this video on using high quality cameras as webcams. And afterwards be sure to check out his channel for my follow-up video on a similar topic. So I use my Canon M50 as my webcam. And as you can see, it is a good job integrating into like OBS. But I also use it in Zoom. I use it in Jitsie. I use it in Skype. I even use it on the web version of Discord when I need to. And though it's not perfect, it does have a pretty decent image quality. It's low resolution. I think it's like 540 pixels high. But it's almost nigh visibly lossless coming through the pipe. So it looks pretty clean. I shoot some of my videos this way where I just capture right to the camera like this. And I do all my video conferencing this way. I have a beautiful lens on my Canon M50 with the nice, you know, powerful depth of field and all that kind of stuff. This is the end result. And when you do your streams or your desktops or your video conferences, you too can have this quality if you have a supported camera. Let's dive into it. This is something that can come really handy for the project. And it's totally optional if you want to do longer form videos. You can actually get this thing. It's got a barrel jack on this side. And it shows up as a Canon battery on this side. Of course you have your barrel jack that goes into the battery pack and then the USB plug. You give it any cell phone charger power or whatever and it'll work. On the bottom of most modern cameras is a spot for it right here. Just kind of slide that in there. It plugs into the hole. And you can power the battery for as long as you need. Before we get too crazy into this process, it is going to require a little bit of software. The great news is the software is free and open source and very likely already included into the repository of your Linux distribution. I'm running a Debian system and in Debian, they are definitely included. So the first one is G-Photo. G-Photo is kind of like the remote control interface for lots of different cameras. Now, this is where you got to start because you got to find out if your camera is supported by G-Photo. I'm running the Canon M50. So I'm going to do M50 and sure enough here we go. Canon EOS M50 image capture for taking pictures. Trigger capture. I don't remember what that is. Live view. That's the one that makes the difference in configuration, which is good. You can set modes and whatnot, but live view. That's the sweet stuff. If you got live view, you're in luck. The other module we're going to need is the video for Linux loopback. It's a module but installs under Debian at least as just pseudo after install video for Linux loopback. And once this is enabled, and I'll get to that in a minute. Once it's enabled, you can have this pipe video into a virtual webcam. I can't stress this enough. It doesn't do the audio. It just does the video. Again, we'll dive into that. And the last piece, of course, is FFM peg. I mean, this really doesn't need that much of an introduction. Everyone knows FFM peg is absolutely phenomenal. And one of the things it can do is it can take images or video or feeds, and then it knows how to pipe it into video for the next loopback. So we're going to grab the G photo to spit the video into FFM peg. And then FFM peg will pipe it into video for the next loopback. And then boom, a web camera. But how do we do it? So you got your hardware setup. Make sure your cameras plugged in. Make sure it's turned on. Make sure you got your USB connected to the port. And let's make sure our camera, in my case, the Canon M50 G photo to auto detect. And boom, the Canon EOS M50. All right. So the next part is we need to make sure our module is loaded. So sudo mod probe video for Linux to loopback. This thing's fighting me. Video for Linux to loopback. Exclusive. This is terrible. So we're going to drop this command in here. I'm going to go over what this command does. I usually script this out because I'm lazy. You can type it in by hand if you want. But I highly recommend making it alias or something. So obviously we're going to run as sudo because this is a module. Mod probe video for Linux loopback. Exclusive caps. As the way I understand this is exclusive caps adds a compatibility of some sort. I know that when I have that on programs like zoom and jitzy automatically recognize the camera. And if it's not in there, it's hit and miss. Max buffer was just kind of a buffer problem that I think was solved with that. Again, your camera may be different. Check the documentation. It's easy to get lost in the weeds, but it's totally worth it. So we start the module like that. Modules running. If for any reason you need to kill this module. Mod probe dash R video for Linux to loop back that destroys the module. So you're back to square one, but you get going again. Boom. Again, script it. It'll make your life so much easier. So now I'm going to run this other command, which I'm totally going to copy and paste because it's a doozy. It's a doozy. This is where we kind of bring it all together. You know that recognizes our camera. I'm going to case the M 50 standard output that says grab whatever we're grabbing and just send it along down into a pipe. Set config viewfinder one. So some cameras like mine have more than one viewfinder. Mine has the little eyepiece you look through. You know, if you're in bright light and you need like a tiny little spot where you can peek through with your eye. And then it has to flip out screen viewfinder zero. The default is the tiny low resolution eyeballs pole and viewfinder one is the pop out screen. And we want to run the capture movie. So we're going to be capturing a succession of frames versus single frame frames. We have the pipe and we bring it into F F M peg. This is this is the best part here. This is where all the magic happens. F F M peg will grab the frames. Now, if you have an M 50 and similar cameras, you'll be in luck. It already actually outputs from the capture as a raw MJ peg directly from the camera. So no hardware encoding has to happen. If your camera is capturing like raw image files, you might have to change this V codec to MJ peg and then add a bit rate to it. I do threads once I don't want to go to haywire, but I'm not entirely sure if threads is affected by the copy. I'm not sure. Again, check the documentation, do your research and experiment. Now for the format video for Linux to we pipe to video to I usually do video to because sometimes I have to webcams on there. I have the built in webcam on the slap top. Sometimes I have my logitech and sometimes I'm using a capture card. So the downside of this technique is sometimes you run it and it's running the correct script and it still fails. And you have to run it a few times to make sure it's running correctly, which is really hard when you're first setting up. But once you build the script, you know, you run it, check it, run it. It's good. I usually set mine up at the beginning of my work day and let the camera just chill all day long. So we're going to run it. So far, it looks good. So I'm going to check it out with a brave browser. I'm going to use a brave browser to get over to Jitsie, my preferred video chat platform might work. It might not and looks like it works. Here we are. We're popping frames through. So there we are. It's simple as that. Things to keep in mind. This does not pull audio data. It is literally just pulling the raw MJ pegs, piping them through the USB 2.0. And that's it. No audio. So external microphones are your friends. Give yourself a nice little Fifine for cheap like I have, which you can make sound pretty good. But you do have to make sure you have a separate audio source for your conferencing. And that is just the surface. We just barely scratched the surface of this technique. Hopefully this has been a helpful tutorial. Thank you for checking this out. And back on my page, Chris actually made a video follow up because realistically, I just barely scratched the surface of what can be done with cheap photo. There's some amazing things that can be done with that. So check that out. Link will be down below. Thanks again for watching. Visit my website FilmsByChris.com. And also check out his channel. Again, there will be links in the description. And have a great day.