There is also OBS Studio (and others) that can watch a part of the screen and capture that, turning it into a video feed. The application thinks its just using a different video camera.

This allows, for example, the output of CamTwist to be fed into the camera for Google Meet, Skype, etc. They can create a virtual camera for other applications to use as an input video stream. Similarly there are programs that can do this with video, such as CamTwist on the Mac. The second application then selects a Microphone called BlackHole from which it gets the audio stream.) You select that and the audio output goes to BlackHole. (BlackHole etc appears alongside speakers and headphones as the output device. BlackHole and Soundflower are example applications on Mac that can connect the audio output of one program to the microphone of another, if you can tell the application to use different “speakers”. There are some 3rd party utilities around that make this possible, such as “Virtual Cable”. That is, on Mac and WIndows you cannot just hook the audio/video output of program 1 to the input of program 2. It may be obvious to most, but it took me a moment to realize that applications can read from the microphone or camera, and can send output to the speakers or screen, but that does not mean you can do a UNIX pipe command between them. There are lots of interesting things you can do, but they don’t always all work together as you plan. It was interesting to see how the complexity can blow out pretty quickly. In this post I focus on some of the underlying technologies. If you’ve got an external USB camera (which we highly suggest if you do lots of remote learning or work, because Apple’s built-in cameras are so bad), you should check your camera maker’s website for any free software it offers.In my last post I talked about some of the decision process I used when exploring which video platform to use a series of online office hours for ecommerce. It’s frustrating to shell out money for features that probably should be found in Apple’s system preferences, but with a little fiddling around you can really improve the look of your webcam. You can even control many third-party cameras with Webcam Settings. Webcam Settings sits up in your menu bar for quick access, and doesn’t consume much in the way of resources.

You can save these settings as quick presets, too. You can adjust exposure time, aperture, brightness, contrast, zoom, backlight compensation, focus, and lots more-depending on the hardware features of the camera you’re adjusting. It works fine on macOS Big Sur and Apple Silicon macs (through Rosetta), and directly controls features of your webcam, so it works with nearly every app. Webcam Settings gives you more control over your FaceTime camera.Ī better solution is probably the Webcam Settings app, which you can grab for $7.99 in the Mac app store.

How to enable camera on skype on a mac