Automatically Light Up a Sign When Your Webcam is in Use #Python #USB
An “On Air” sign is so handy, whether to alert the family you’re broadcasting or to have in the background of your stream. John Boero posts on Fedora Magazine about making one.
At first I was surprised Zoom doesn’t have this kind of feature built in. But then again I might use Teams, Meet, Hangouts, WebEx, Bluejeans, or any number of future video collaboration apps. Wouldn’t it make sense to just use a system-wide watch for active webcams or microphones? Like most problems in life, this one can be helped with the Linux kernel. A simple check of the uvcvideo module will show if a video device is in use. Without using events all that is left is to poll it for changes. I chose to build a taskbar icon for this. I would normally do this with my trusty C++. But I decided to step out of my usual comfort zone and use Python in case someone wanted to port it to other platforms.
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