Don't use snap, it is known to cause issues.
What kind of issues? I've used it before, and it worked just fine for me. There were a boatload of permissions that I had to set, so it could use things that were outside of its sandbox (one of snap's "features", and all documented on the same page that I linked to), but once that was done, it was great. It had a bunch of plugins preinstalled and "just working" that I had a bear of a time getting to work piecemeal.
Not saying there *aren't* any issues, just that I never saw any.
Also the settings are not in the tools menu.
Okay, you're right on that one. v28 has them here:
I think a previous version does have them in the toolbar, when it was still an external plugin like all the others, so I was going off of memory from that.
One should have installed the v4l2loopback module. If it still does not show up, try loading the module manually before starting OBS.
That could do it too. Though if that's the problem, I might call it a minor bug for OBS to not show it at all. I think it should show it, and then show an error when you try to use it. That would make it much easier to troubleshoot.
However, my v28.1.2 of OBS would ask for my password on first start (why???) and then the VCam would work. A bit of googling told me that it was trying to load that module in the background and needed root permission to do it, hence the password. So I dug through the source code to see exactly what it was doing there, and copy/pasted that line into a system startup script that I made to run as root. (in Ubuntu,
sudo crontab,
@reboot) No more password prompt.
That line is:
Bash:
modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 card_label='OBS Virtual Camera'
There are other ways to load a module on startup, but this works too. And I like to keep my modifications all in one place if I can, so I can copy them later to another build.
Most of what I find as the "right" or intended way to do it, is all over the place for each different thing. Some in ~/.config, others in /etc/<something>, still more somewhere else, etc. Makes it hard to set up a similar system from scratch, because I KNOW I'll forget one and then wonder why it doesn't work. A script that runs on startup and has all the commands in it (two actually, for me: one as root and one as user) is much easier to copy.
