Use Canon EOS 90D as a webcam for Google Meet / Skype / Zoom / etc on Linux Ubuntu 22.04 with nVidia hardware acceleration

By Iain Cuthbertson

Quick and dirty post that pulls together a couple of sources. I might improve the post at some point. I might not…

Initial set-up:

Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsuY4o2zLVQ

Additional code to specify which video device to create.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install gphoto2 v4l2loopback-utils ffmpeg

echo 'dslr-webcam' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

echo <<EOT | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/dslr-webcam.conf
alias dslr-webcam v4l2loopback 
options v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 max_buffers=2 video_nr=69
EOT

Hardware acceleration set-up:

Source https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-install-ffmpeg-with-nvidia-gpu-acceleration-on-linux/

I’ll assume you have nvidia drives installed

sudo apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkit

mkdir ~/nvidia/ && cd ~/nvidia/
git clone https://git.videolan.org/git/ffmpeg/nv-codec-headers.git

cd nv-codec-headers && sudo make install

cd ~/nvidia/
git clone https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg/

sudo apt install build-essential yasm cmake libtool libc6 libc6-dev unzip wget libnuma1 libnuma-dev

cd ~/nvidia/ffmpeg/
./configure --enable-nonfree --enable-cuda-nvcc --enable-libnpp --extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/cuda/include --extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/cuda/lib64

make -j $(nproc)

Combined to pull video from the camera to a video device:

echo 'alias start-gphoto2-webcam="gphoto2 --capture-image && gphoto2 --stdout --capture-movie | ~/nvidia/ffmpeg/ffmpeg -hwaccel cuda -i - -vcodec rawvideo 
-pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video69"' >> ~/.bashrc

Finally:

  • Logout/in
  • Plug the camera into the computer
  • Turn the camera on
  • Run: start-gphoto2-webcam
  • Use in an application that uses a webcam