Re: Webcamd future

On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 1:56 PM Nicolas Goy <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I was appointed as maintainer of webcamd, and I realize the situation is
> a bit complicated on the human side of things as the original author
> passed away and he was an important member of the community. I hope to
> be able to respect his work moving things forward.
>
>
> The upstream project is now unmaintained and we apply patches as port
> files but this is not a good situation.
>
> The webcamd project is very important to FreeBSD on the desktop and I
> think it deserve to be maintained properly.
>
> While I am quite confident in C, I am ignorent of USB stack and linux
> kernel so I don't feel like I am the best person to write significant
> changes to the project. But I think I can manage patches and hope the
> project will stay stable.
>
> The project is on an unmaintained github repository and will need to be
> forked.
>
> I would prefer to put the project outside of github and under a common
> control (under a foundation organization or something).
>
> So I am wondering if freebsd has such umbrella where we could put the
> proect.
>
> Best regards
>
> --
> Nicolas Goy

Thank you Nicolas for stepping up with continuation of the (in loving
memory of) HPS's amazing work!

Webcamd is _very_ important on desktop and I use it daily with my
webcam as well as usb-hdmi grabber for daily videoconferences and
often for streaming related events from my FreeBSD workstation.

I know kernel level video drivers are being introduced, but not yet
covers the current webcamd functionality, and not available in older
releases such as 14.

Thus it still deserves a maintenance, until maybe it is moved into
kernel-level video driver (maybe not), for sure a solid repository, I
hope TFF can help here :-)

When in need of help with USB please ask on the mailing lists maybe we
could sort things out with the community :-) What are relations to
Linux kernel that you mentioned? How this can be avoided?

Thank you again and have fun! :-)
Tomek

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info