We got a report that version 0.1.6 of ucanvcam for linux needs the “gd” library to be installed on your machine. Sorry about that, we’ll fix this next time around.

In the meantime, if you are getting messages like this:

ucanvcam: error while loading shared libraries: libgd.so.2: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory

You can get rid of the problem by doing:

apt-get install libgd2-noxpm

or

apt-get install libgd2-xpm

or the equivalent for your distribution.

Please let us know if you run into any other problems like this.

Our demo video for ucanvcam has caught up with the latest version. See the silent grainy happy lizard demo. The videography leaves something to be desired, but the main point is that effects can be created online with the picture mixer and downloaded as stills or animations. So put your video stream in a heart or on a wine bottle and enjoy!

A new version of ucanvcam has been released (download from the usual place). The most interesting addition is an effect that lets you take a blender-based design created on the picture mixer and project your webcam feed onto a surface or surfaces within that. Video examples coming soon…

Update: video example is available.

Instructions about using the ucanvcam virtual camera on linux and windows have been updated in the user manual.

Coming soon: create pictures or animations with the picture mixer, and use them from ucanvcam.

The ucanvcam GUI is now compiling for Linux in portable form and available for download. No need to compile it manually any more. Any feedback about failures/successes with the build would be much appreciated. It has so far been reported to run on various versions of debian, ubuntu, and redhat.

ucanvcam is a free and open virtual webcam tool, currently supporting Linux and Windows. No Mac support yet, for lack of a Mac guru…

We added output-to-file as an option to ucanvcam on Linux; in a related event, we now have a demo video of a rather enigmatic elephant.

You can now download a binary release of ucanvcam, the free and open-source virtual webcam, here. This release is a command-line version for now, to make the binary more portable. A separate release with the full GUI will be coming soon (you can get it now by compiling from source). Remember, you need the vloopback kernel module to actually output images; however you can test the program without this module.

Version 0.1.3 of ucanvcam is out. It fixes a few issues on Windows, and makes a start for a command-line interface as an alternative to the graphical interface (particularly handy on linux). If you are looking for source code, you’re better off taking it from svn, since it is changing rapidly. The numbered versions are more important for the Windows builds.

ucanvcam version 0.1.2 (aka “just barely usable”) is out. MakeSweet is hosting a windows build. ucanvcam is a free-and-open-source virtual webcam project. It currently compiles under windows and linux. On windows it can output via directx to applications such as skype. On linux it can output via a video loopback module, again to applications such as skype. It has some random limits though at the moment (hint: 320×240 images). Screenshot:

Update: there’s now a proper windows installer.

We are collaborating on an open-source free-software project called ucanvcam to help build virtual webcams or add special effects to a webcam stream. A tool based on this should be showing up on makesweet eventually. The basic idea is to make an API for doing webcam video stream manipulation in an OS-neutral way. Support is just Windows and Linux so far though, there’s nothing there for Macs yet. Anyway, ucanvcam should take care of all the messy OS details and leave users of the project free to create fun effects. We’ll be doing our bit to make this happen.

Related projects out there:

• EffecTV
• CamTwist
• Splitcam, SuperWebcam, WebcamMax, ManyCam, …
• Video jockey software such as Gephex

Update:
You can now download a binary release of ucanvcam. The release is a GUI for windows, and command-line for Linux. You can download and compile the source to get a GUI for Linux, but we don’t have a portable build for it yet.

Update (2):
Now the GUI is ready and downloadable for both Linux and Windows.

Are you interested in an open-source virtual webcam? If so, why? Leave us a note - the more information we have about interest in this the more we can justify contributing to the development on it.