Restricting the portion of the videocamera frame that zoom/skype/teams can see

Hardware
1

Does anyone know how to restrict the portion of the videocamera frame that zoom/skype/teams can see? Because I don’t have the ability to edit and recompile zoom/skype/teams, I can’t fix them to only use a portion of the camera field of view. Even if these programs had user controls for this, I don’t have any reason to trust them. I need a kernel solution. I’ve just spent an hour trying to find what Linux kernel controls for this there might be and how I might be able to tweak them from userspace. However, I failed to find any such controls. The ability to turn the camera off is well documented, but how to restrict the field of view (i.e., crop the frames that the applications see) seems to be either missing or well hidden.

Any suggestions? This is a clear privacy issue.

Long live free software!

2

Not kernel level, but you could use OBS to crop the view then start the virtual camera and have zoom/teams/etc use the virtual camera from OBS.

3 Likes
3

Thanks! I had heard of this once but forgotten it. I will try this.

If anyone knows of a solution where I can just plug some values into a file in /sys, I’d still be interested in hearing about it.

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4

Works beautifully. After using it a bit I no longer think a kernel solution would be practical. You need a user interface to tweak the cropping.

1 Like