Using a camera as a Virtual Webcam on Linux

Using a thingino camera as a virtual webcam on Linux is pretty easy. A gstreamer pipeline can be created where the input comes directly from the camera's RTSP, and gets piped directly to a v4l2loopback device. Consumers of video can then use the same v4l2 device as if it were a webcam.

You need to install gstreamer on Linux, for instance, on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libgstreamer1.0-0 gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-tools gstreamer1.0-alsa gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio

You might also need to install the v4l2-loopback module

sudo apt install v4l2loopback-dkms

First of all, probe the v4l2loopback:

sudo modprobe v4l2loopback video_nr=10

This will add a new video device on /dev/video10.

Now, let's assume the thingino camera is on 192.168.0.5, so run the following to launch a gstreamer pipeline:

gst-launch-1.0 rtspsrc location=rtsp://thingino:thingino@192.168.0.5/ch0 latency=0 buffer-mode=auto ! rtph264depay ! h264parse ! decodebin ! videoconvert ! video/x-raw,format=YUY2 ! tee ! v4l2sink device=/dev/video10

This needs to keep running in the background to read the RTSP pipeline into the v4l2 device.