Hi. I was online yesterday trying out Google+ hangouts. I was interested in the fact that some people in the hangout were displaying pictures online as if they were the output from their video camera. I was wondering if there's a package that lets you do that with linux... debian specifically.

I looked at the options on the 'googletalk-plugin' program, and they DO have an option to display your own screen as the source for others to see from your computer (instead of the camera) BUT you cannot, as I would like, simply choose a image to display in place of your camera input. I'd like to choose a png or jpg for example.

If anyone knows of a program that does this, I'd be interested in hearing about it. For the record, I'm using testing and the multimedia repository, and I'm fully updated.

I found something called vivi which is part of the linux kernel. You type:

# modprobe vivi

and you get a 'virtual video' device in your device list when you are using v4l2. It shows up in dropdown boxes right along side of your video camera. When you select it it generates colorbars for your computer's video output. This is the sort of thing I'm interested in, but it's not exactly what I want... you don't seem to be able to modify the module's output in any way.

So, I guess I'm still looking. Any help would be appreciated.