Ubuntu – How to use the android phone as a webcam, microphone and a speaker when video calling on skype

Blacklist drivers

In both cases kernel drivers may be loaded for both, the internal sound card, and the webcam to be recognized by Ubuntu. We can find out which drivers are loaded by the following command in a terminal:

lsmod

From this list we can see which of these kernel modules may be responsible for our (specific) hardware (e.g. an Intel sound card may need the snd_hda_intel module).

Blacklisting these kernel module will stop this device from being recognized by your system. To do so we edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf as root to add the following line:

blacklist <name_of_module>

See also: How can I control which sound card Ubuntu uses for playback?

In case we still need the internal audio card for playback audio we can just mute the input microphone source, e.g by running alsamixer in a terminal.

I had exactly the same problem and I have found a good workaround for it.

Suppose your webcam is in /dev/video0.

Please execute the following steps.

1. Install v4l2loopback by running

   sudo apt-get install v4l2loopback-dkms
   

2. Enable the v4l2loopback module by running

   sudo modprobe v4l2loopback
   

   This will install a virtual webcam, for example in /dev/video1

3. Finally, when you need your webcam on Skype, just run this command.

   ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -vsync 2 -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video1
   

This command redirects the real webcam in /dev/video0 to the virtual webcam /dev/video1 which should be recognized by Skype (it worked for me).

If you don't want to write the long ffmpeg command each time, you can save it into a script, say launch_skype_cam.sh defined below.

#!/bin/bash
ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -vsync 2 -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video1

Or you can set an alias, for example in your .bashrc file.

alias launch_skype_cam='ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -vsync 2 -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video1'