MacOS camera status with Opal Camera (maybe all virtual cameras)

I recently purchased an Opal C1 webcam and really like it. But when I’m using it, my MacBook Pro shows the Camera in use sensor as off. I imagine they’re creating a virtual camera so they can run processing on the image through their Mac app. Is there any way to get Home Assistant to recognize that camera?

Sounds like their camera app needs to be updated to macOS 12.3’s new native APIs for virtual cameras, which allows them to work in sandboxed apps (without breaking the sandbox and allowing random libraries to run in the app). Most companies are updating pretty quickly because this allows the cameras to work in FaceTime and other system apps, so you may want to see if they’re making any progress on it.

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Awesome. Thanks for the response. I’ve sent the note over to their team.

I have this Opal C1 as well and stumbled upon this thread. Did you ever hear back from them? I’m trying to avoid needing to build a custom integration to have my Mac fire an http request to the HA http binary sensor to get this to work. .

No they never responded. The latest Opal software update claimed to make it available to FaceTime and every other app, but still doesn’t show as “Camera in use” in HA.

For now, I turn on my key light based on whether the microphone is active. Not perfect but mostly gets the job done. If you write that custom integration, I’d love to share it.

It looks like it works! Latest 0.21 software and I just started a zoom mtg with camera on:

I also tested the "Camera in use’ sensor and while the values didn’t look like they changed frequent enough in the History, when i tested with a simple notification automation it worked every time i toggled my Opal camera from zoom

Hot damn! I’ll have to update my camera tonight.