showmewebcam VS gentoo-on-rpi-64bit

Yes! I use pi zero and a 3D printed case with the HQ camera and a decent lens. The field of view is exactly right for video calls.

https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam/releases

Also related: Take a Raspberry Pi Mini, a Raspberry Pi HQ camera, and install this firmware

https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam

and it turns your Pi into a USB webcam with a C mount lens.

The Pi Zero runs https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam and presents itself as a generic USB webcam to operating systems.

I use showmewebcam for the usb-capability, but I think it's possible to have it wireless.

Very nice! I'm also planning on testing it out with the showmewebcam software, which might make it even more customizable! https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam

You want to take a look at buildroot-based approaches. They're not quite instant-on, but they're tolerable. https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam is a good example.

With the composite kernel driver you can create as many virtual gadgets as you want from a single usb otg port. Lots of people have done it and documented extensively for the pi0. Here is my list (look at the composite gadget section): https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam/wiki/Further-Documentation

> So there is a market gap between so-so webcams for $100-200 and a full-blown setup with a mirrorless camera, an external mic and lighting panels that will cost almost a grand or two, if you're so inclined.

Try our free software project that uses a Pi and its HQ sensor to make a USB webcam [1]. You'll have a wide range of lenses [2] and cases [3] that people cook up for their personal use.

Last time I commented here, there have been criticisms about the quality of the lens that the Pi foindation sell. We have discovered many other decent alternative lenses that help remedy the quality and distortion issue of the stock lenses. An example of a good guide is the commonlands lens guide [4].

The software is very actively developed and we have a pretty supportive community with good software engineering practices. Check it out, you might even like it!

1. https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam

2. https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam/wiki/Lenses

3. https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam/wiki/Cases

4. https://commonlands.com/blogs/camera-engineering/raspi-video...

You're probably thinking of the now unmaintained https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit. He took a %dayjob% that required him to stop committing to open source projects or, possibly, just

64 bit with gentoo i think is slightly less supported; but that is just from me looking around the package archive, and what it appears to be from the wiki. Though i am in the process of taking sakaki's 64 bit image and moving it over to use the official gentoo repos, so i guess i am glutton for punishment

Last time I was looking into this, no normal 64-bit rpi distro (including alarm) supported it. There was only gentoo that somebody hacked together offering mmal interface for h/w codecs: https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit

You can build a binary distro based on Gentoo, e.g. https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit (sadly EOL'ed several months ago).

Anyway, from my own experience, the video decoding performance of gentoo-on-rpi-64bit was somehow nowhere close to LibreELEC, on the same hardware. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learnt there...

yes. use gentoo. specifically this version: https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit

This is very encouraging—I'm doing the same thing eventually on my Surface Pro (2017 model). Right now, I've just got it on a raspberry pi 4B 8GB. It works amazingly there, but I'm using a binary-heavy overlay and dwm. Firefox works better than I expected, but I haven't bothered with sound much, so I don't watch any video or anything. Also, the image I use (I use the “lite” variant available there) comes with an easy-to-use update tool (“genup”). At the very least, I consider it a great way to get acquainted with a significant portion of the Gentoo experience.