I’ve used OBS as a virtual camera input for various reasons (to compose scenes, to control field of view, etc.). I was setting it up on my desktop (Pop_Os! 20.04 with Guix as the package manager) today because Microsoft Teams recognizes my El Gato CamLink 4K but won’t show any video. Since I had successfully used virtual camera before I tried setting it up, but ran into some issues.

OBS needs the v4l2loopback driver in order to enable the virtual camera functionality.

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guix install obs-studio v4l2loopback-linux-module

Installing OBS and the loopback driver worked but even after a restart OBS would not show the virtual camera option. I decided to see if it was a package/path issue and tried using apt but even after restart that didn’t work, turns out apt’s version of OBS is too old.

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apt install -y obs v4l2loopback-dkms

NOTE package names are different

Ultimately, I had to get OBS from guix and the loopback from apt. This mismatch makes me uneasy since it goes directly against a declarative config, so I’m documenting the discrepancy for when it bites me in the future.