New Whatsapp Desktop Application does not work with OBS Virtual Camera...

[SyntaxJO]

The Droidcam virtual output plugin should work with WhatsApp on Windows

DroidCam Virtual Output

An alternative virtual output plugin that connects OBS Studio with the DroidCam virtual camera drivers. Note: This plugin is not connected to the DroidCam phone app, see the DroidCam Source plugin instead. Key Differences Existing virtualcam...

obsproject.com

WORKED for Windows 11. Need to restart comp after drivers install (pretty sure drivers are different than the DroidCam app, so do install them).

 

[marvincredible]

So glad to see so many solutions being offered and people being helped by them. A friend recently helped me come up with another workaround today, using a HDMI capture card and a EDID passthrough device (HDMI). The EDID acts a virtual display which I then output OBS to, as if it was any other monitor. The capture card then sees this display output as a video feed and Whatsapp sees the capture card as a genuine camera device (which it is). It's a quick, dirty and cheap fix but a result is a result and so far (if Whatsapp don't eventually decide to try and block this too) it's working like a charm.

 

[gewone]

... using a HDMI capture card and a EDID passthrough device (HDMI). The EDID acts a virtual display which I then output OBS to, as if it was any other monitor. The capture card then sees this display output as a video feed and Whatsapp sees the capture card as a genuine camera device (which it is). It's a quick, dirty and cheap fix but a result is a result and so far (if Whatsapp don't eventually decide to try and block this too) it's working like a charm.

Thanks! <3

Does _all_ HDMI capture cards have this virtual display thing? Because I reckon your solution depends on it! Can you guide me in the jungle of HDMI capture cards? Link me to this one you guarantee will work, and I'm hoping it's not expensive.

 

[AaronD]

Can you guide me in the jungle of HDMI capture cards? Link me to this one you guarantee will work, and I'm hoping it's not expensive.

Unfortunately, the worlds of cheap and good captures don't really overlap.

There are lots of cheap ones, but they have problems:

• Probably the worst problem is a cheap USB 2 chip behind a genuine USB 3 connector (the additional pins for USB 3 are present but not hooked up), and advertised as USB 3 with all of those benefits. That then requires the card itself to squash the video, hard, to cram it through the comparative soda straw that is USB 2, and it uses a dirt cheap compression method to do it - MJPEG, which is just a JPG still image of each frame with no knowledge of the other frames - which further hurts the quality even more than that bitrate would normally have to.
• The latency (delay) can be random. I had a set of 4 cheap ones before I knew the previous point (still do, not used now), that were supposed to be identical to each other, and they were always out of sync *with each other*, by random amounts and directions every time! Good luck chasing *that* with sync delays elsewhere!
• It's effectively random anyway, what works and what doesn't, or how it partially works. Haphazard design and/or manufacturing, and cheap enough to not be worth returning. Lots of threads on these forums to that effect.

Just don't bother.

If you want something good, and it must be USB, stick with the name brands that actually care about customer loyalty, and thus have some accountability to those customers. And expect to pay around $80 to $120 for a single input.

Trying to have multiple video inputs on USB is also troublesome, not because of anything shady, but because of USB itself. Uncompressed HD video (all the good ones are uncompressed) takes more than half of the available bandwidth on a USB 3 controller. So one is okay, but two must either degrade something or just not work. Also note that this is per *controller* and not per port. A lot of systems have only one USB controller and internal hubs to connect all the ports, and that's no different from an external hub. Limit one HD video source on USB, if it needs to work reliably.
If you do happen to have 2 controllers, both of which connect to external ports, then limit 2, if you use the correct ports to actually have them on separate controllers. Etc.

If you can use an internal PCIe slot, that's usually a better option than USB. Far greater bandwidth there, so multiple-input single cards are perfectly okay, and they tend to have lower latency than USB too.
Just don't get one that's designed for security systems, that have just one converter (the expensive part) and a quick-and-dirty switch to connect it to one input at a time. Spend a bit more, and get one that actually has a dedicated converter for each input, so they can all work simultaneously.