Using a raspberry pi as a webcam

Preconditions

• host machine has v4l2loopback for the virtual camera device (/dev/video0)
• raspi with camera module on network

Steps

1. sudo modprobe v4l2loopback
2. nc -lp $PORT | ffmpeg -i pipe: -f h264 -r 30 -f v4l2 /dev/video0
3. send the data back to the host ssh RASPI -c raspivid -o tcp://$HOST:$PORT -t 0
   • the raspivid command can also specify rotations, flips, resolution, etc. It tends to saturate a slow network with raw video data. Newer models (I'm using model 3b+) may be able to encode the data first?
4. use as a webcam or test the view with mpv "av://v4l2:/dev/video0"