Products and Tools
Video calls using a networked camera
September 25, 2024
I’ve long used OBS to manage things for my video calling. I started because my DSLR has a 4:3 aspect ratio that I wanted to crop to a widescreen view. Over time, I’ve added color correction, multiple cameras, and a nameplate overlay.
But when I switched between computers, my video call setup wasn’t easy to take with me. And some video calling platforms (Google Meet, especially) suck so many resources from the computer that running something heavy like OBS often leads to dropped frames, frozen video, and video turning off. When I join a call from my five-year-old Intel MacBook, the fans run so loud that people on the call can hear them.
I had an old Dell Windows laptop gathering dust, so I decided to build a setup with that as a dedicated video management machine that provides a virtual camera over the network to my other computers. This blog post describes how I set it up.
Running OBS and exporting the Virtual Camera
I installed OBS on the laptop and copied my config files from one of my Mac laptops. In practice, this copying didn’t work well. Windows had different device names and file paths, so the imported config didn’t work. Instead of...