Re: Webcamd future

---- Am Sun, 23 Aug 2026 17:13:33 +0200 [email protected] schrieb ----



> On Sun, Aug 23, 2026 at 1:56 PM Nicolas Goy 
> 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 :-)


webcamd is also the solution to use DVB-C/T/S2 devices with FreeBSD. So what we know as video4linux in the Linux world.  All users of MythTV, tvheadend (used by Kodi) and minisatip have it.


I don't expect that any of this devices will ever get a FreeBSD kernel driver but the drivers exist in the Linux world and webcamd was a masterpiece that made it possible. Yeah we should at least make sure that the code will be available and maintainable for the time being. It probably will not need any big Linux version updates because I guess the market for DVB devices is dead and even video4linux project is basically dead.


To answer your question, yes there is a FreeBSD Organisation on GitHub and it already contains projects like pkg, vm-bhyve etc. and I think it would be a suitable home for webcamd as well.


I will get in contact with bofh@ how we can deal with that - or I will nag some people in Brussels at the next DevSummit about it.