virtual_webcam_background VS Linux-Fake-Background-Webcam

I've been using https://github.com/allo-/virtual_webcam_background

There are many others similar to the above. They all basically work by using the v4l2loopback driver to create a loopback video device. Then you have the program consume video from the real webcam video device, apply a deep learning model that subtracts the background and replaces it with an image or video of your choice, and outputs the vide to the loopback device. Then you configure your video conferencing software (zoom, teams, webex, whatever) to use the loopback device instead of the real one.

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.