Any Way To Have VLC for Windows Emulate a Windows Camera?

[pone44]

Most of the time people use VLC to take output from a Windows camera and then stream that out over the network. Is there a way to instead have the *output* of VLC emulate a Windows camera and thus send its output to the camera?

My application for this is being able to have a group of friends watch the same movie together, but we need to be time-synched on the output. I have tried streaming the movie over VLC and it just doesn't work well. It is also very difficult to support that when your friend has no technology experience. You have to deal with firewall issues too.

What I wanted to try instead was to have a website that takes as its input the output of a local camera and then time synchs that video to everyone in the chat room. The added plus of this approach is you get a chatroom, not just a time-synched video image. That creates a much more social environment to watch a video.

Is there a way to configure VLC Player - or any MP4 player - to emulate a Windows camera and act as the input to any application - like a browser - that might use the camera as an input for its own function?

[betwixt]

Is there a way to instead have the *output* of VLC emulate a Windows camera and thus send its output to the camera?

That doesn't make sense, a camera is a video input device. I also doubt VLC is mostly used to stream webcam video but it is quite capable of doing so.

If you set the input device in VLC to a disc or file source it will stream it instead of the camera video. However, syncing with several viewers depends on the individual stream paths and buffering. Suppose for example someone paused their playback or their connection speed required buffering, they would 'time slip' with the other viewers unless they all paused at the same time.

Brian.

[pone44]

Is there a way to instead have the *output* of VLC emulate a Windows camera and thus send its output to the camera?

That doesn't make sense, a camera is a video input device. I also doubt VLC is mostly used to stream webcam video but it is quite capable of doing so.

The camera is video input to the web browser, which then feeds the video stream to a chat room. The website then refeeds that same video stream to whoever is in the chat room, through the browser.

In concept, there is no reason that output of video from some other application running on my local computer cannot be used to emulate the output of video from a camera. The only real difference is that VLC normally outputs video to a monitor or to a network, and in this case I am trying to feed the video stream in a way that makes VLC appear to be a camera, in order to "fake out" any applications - like the web browser - that can only take video input from a camera.

I can think of practical applications for this. If I am talking to someone on a video conferencing application, it might be convenient at times to show the other person a Powerpoint slide presentation. It would be nice in that case to make the PowerPoint application output appear to be coming from a system camera, so that in a videoconferencing application you could point to the source "camera" being Powerpoint, and then the slide presentation would be shown to the other person as your video feed.

If you set the input device in VLC to a disc or file source it will stream it instead of the camera video. However, syncing with several viewers depends on the individual stream paths and buffering. Suppose for example someone paused their playback or their connection speed required buffering, they would 'time slip' with the other viewers unless they all paused at the same time.

It's simply too cumbersome to make this work, once you introduce the requirement to time synch all of the viewers.