How to use Digital Camera for video conferencing

Many digital cameras, such as the ones made by Sony, Canon, Nikon, Sigma, and many other manufacturer can be used as web cameras to provide a significantly better quality.

Getting Digital Camera to work as webcam on Ubuntu Linux

Install dependencies:

$ sudo apt install gphoto2 v4l2loopback-utils v4l2loopback-dkms ffmpeg

Not all digital cameras are supported, please, check if your camera is compatible with gphoto2.

Once the dependencies have been installed, load video loopback device, capture camera video and export it as a video device for use in your video conferencing software:

$ sudo modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 max_buffers=2 && \
gphoto2 --stdout --capture-movie | ffmpeg -i - -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video0 && \
sudo rmmod v4l2loopback