Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam VS BigBlueButton

I'm trying to install Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam, which in turn requires 4l2loopback. Following the 4l2loopback manual, I try the following command to install it:

> Is this really a problem with Zoom or one with Wayland and the Linux distros?

I would say this is really a problem with Zoom, mostly due to the lack of attention paid to their web client.

For me, when it comes to video conferencing, the "table stakes" is working duplex audio over bluetooth, and so far only pipewire has solved this, which means Linux only.

After that, two very important features to have are screen sharing and background blur. For screen sharing, both Chrome/Chromium and Firefox have great support for screencast over pipewire, and so do many wayland compositors such as KDE kwin. As such, on a "pure" wayland system with no X11 window [1], screen sharing is also a solved problem.

Background blur is more ... complicated. When Google Meet rolled out https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/10/background-features-in-goo..., it immediately worked with chrome/chromium, on either wayland or X11. However, to this day, I think it still doesn't work with firefox, for whatever reason. Meanwhile, Zoom Linux client only started to support background blur (without green screen) since 5.7.6 released in August 2021, while Zoom web client remains hopeless.

In my previous job, we use Google Meet, and all is well with wayland. In the current one, we use Zoom, and I have to setup https://github.com/fangfufu/Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam as a workaround.

[1] This is very much doable these days, unless you want to run Slack desktop, which is hit-and-miss when running with --ozone-platform=wayland (unlike other electron-based apps such as Signal desktop), and of course the Zoom Linux app, which is just crap, as described in the article. Solution: run Slack and Zoom as Firefox tabs.

I was going to say, Zoom's absolutely broken greenscreen support is nicely hacked in X by the community with this excellent repo: https://github.com/fangfufu/Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam

It seems pretty cool, but why does it need to be run as root? I can run Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam just fine without root!

I use https://github.com/fangfufu/Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam and it works great (realtime) for video background removal.

Came across [Jitsi](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/tag/v2023.7.2) and [BigBlueButton](https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton), does anyone have experience of running these or others in production?

Middle managers not adapting. When my old job when remote for Covid, my manager would hold telecons, despite having access to videoconference software with the capability to document and screen share (IT setup BigBlueButton ). He would talk to slides we couldn't see, and we were lucky if he sent them out in email before hand.

BBB team has not implemented this feature yet I suppose. https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/1428

You should try BBB : https://bigbluebutton.org/

https://bigbluebutton.org/ is a free and open source classroom software. I would stick to indiependent and free software in your situation

I haven't used it to stream movies, but I use BigBlueButton fairly regularly for video/voice calls

Big Blue Button (https://bigbluebutton.org) is one. We actually used it at work for meetings but it seems they have since pivoted to be for more virtual classroom.

I agree though, even that would need decent IT talent to setup and maintain.