OBS Studio
OBS Studio is free and open-source software for video recording and live streaming, licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license.
Installing Plugins
Plugins are available from the obs-studio-plugins
package set.
They can be installed by either wrapping the package with wrapOBS
:
environment.systemPackages = [
(pkgs.wrapOBS {
plugins = with pkgs.obs-studio-plugins; [
wlrobs
obs-backgroundremoval
obs-pipewire-audio-capture
];
})
];
or using Home Manager:
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
programs.obs-studio = {
enable = true;
plugins = with pkgs.obs-studio-plugins; [
wlrobs
obs-backgroundremoval
obs-pipewire-audio-capture
];
};
}
Including both obs-studio
and (pkgs.wrapOBS {...
in environment.systemPackages
will result in a package collision; if plugins are needed, only include the "wrapped" version, which sets the plugins directory to include Nix-managed plugins (see pkgs/applications/video/obs-studio/wrapper.nix.
Using the Virtual Camera
The virtual camera requires the v4l2loopback
kernel module to be installed, a loopback device configured, and polkit enabled so OBS can access the virtual device:
{ config, ... }:
{
boot.extraModulePackages = with config.boot.kernelPackages; [
v4l2loopback
];
boot.kernelModules = [ "v4l2loopback" ];
boot.extraModprobeConfig = ''
options v4l2loopback devices=1 video_nr=1 card_label="OBS Cam" exclusive_caps=1
'';
security.polkit.enable = true;
}
It is possible to use Droidcam as virtual camera.
If you use a digital camera as a webcam via gphoto2 you will need an additional loopback device to use this camera as a virtual camera. For a setup like this you may wish to change the above v4l2loopback module config to something like this:
boot.extraModprobeConfig = ''
options v4l2loopback devices=2 video_nr=1,2 card_label="OBS Cam, Virt Cam" exclusive_caps=1
'';
For more the arch wiki entry on v4l2loopback is a good reference.
In addition to gphoto2
you will need the v4l-utils
and ffmpeg
packages so that you can use gphoto2 to send the raw feed from your camera to the virtual camera via ffmpeg for example using a command like this[1]:
gphoto2 --stdout autofocusdrive=1 --capture-movie | ffmpeg -i - -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video2