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Recently I have bought GoPro 12. It’s a really nice action camera, but I was interesting if it is possible to use it as a webcam. I have found that GoPro 12 exposes a network interface when connected over USB, so I can use curl to switch the device to the webcam mode and listen the UDP video stream. ffmpeg can output into v4l2loopback, so all messengers and browsers can use this virtual device as a webcam.

Video latency is about 500-700ms on my i7-10700K, so it’s possible to use the device for video calls.

There is a GitHub repo gopro_as_webcam_on_linux which contains a shell script that makes all required actions easier.