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David Heinemeier HanssonandClaude Fable 5.1 7e8feb047d Relay the Elgato Cam Link 4K as a 16:9 virtual camera (#10809)
* Relay the Elgato Cam Link 4K as a 16:9 virtual camera

Browser meeting apps such as Zoom's web client ask the Cam Link for a
standard-definition stream, and Chromium settles on the smallest mode it
offers, 640x480. The Cam Link fills that 4:3 frame by cropping its 16:9
input, and the app then paints the frame into a 16:9 tile, so everyone
comes out stretched wide. The web client has no HD switch to avoid it.

Hide the raw capture node from users and re-expose it through v4l2-relayd
as a 1280x720 virtual camera with the same name, so there is still just
one "Cam Link 4K" to pick and no way to negotiate 4:3 from it. udev
starts the relay whenever the Cam Link enumerates and stops it on unplug,
and the relay only pulls frames while something is watching. The sink
runs unsynced because v4l2src stamps each frame with its capture time,
which a synced sink treats as already late and drops.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* Take the review fixes for the Cam Link 4K relay

Tie only the device's stop into the relay instance. A start dependency on
it left a job waiting on a device that never comes whenever the base
v4l2-relayd.service is started without a Cam Link attached, since the
package generator wants every configured instance.

Let the loopback unit rerun on each relay start, so a deleted or unloaded
device is recreated on replug instead of the oneshot staying satisfied.

Start the relay outright at the end of the migration. The udev trigger
only starts it when the rule is new to the device, and a failed module
build would otherwise pass silently with the raw camera already hidden.

Run the hardware fix after the Panther Lake kernel swap, as it pulls in a
DKMS module that would otherwise build twice.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>

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Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-08 14:09:51 +02:00
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