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Comment by dumdumdumdum | Hacker News Reader

Needed to blur the clutter behind me for meetings. Zoom and Google Meets don't support that on Linux. Couldn't find any existing solution that would give me a decent frame-rate for HD resolution without lagging. Wrote this instead.

Relies heavily on GStreamer under the hood for the video processing bits. And mediapipe for the selfie segmentation bit. Obviously need v4l2loopback to emulate a webcam. It's functional, but feedback and contributions are welcome :)

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Zoom desktop on Linux added support for this recently (20th August). I tested this a bit, and it seems to work okay. Has blur support.

See https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/205759689-Release-... and https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360043484511

That's good news, but I'm kinda stuck using the web interface because the desktop client doesn't allow sharing single Wayland windows in presentation mode. Unless they've changed that too recently?

I was at a meeting with a vendor the other day, and I got an option to enable Blur on the web interface in Chrome. Might be a beta-feature.

It doesn't support blur:

> The blurred background option is only available for the Windows and macOS desktop clients, as well as the Android and iOS mobile apps. Desktop clients must meet the "Image only without a physical green screen" requirements.

I think the docs are not updated correctly, I have blur on my local Zoom client (Running https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zoom)

Here's a screenshot of the settings: https://imgur.com/a/f1XgOwz

Hm, on my Ubuntu 20.04 i don't have Blur, only 3 virtual backgrounds, none of which work unless i click on "I have a green screen."

I did a full reinstall, the version is the latest, and the dependencies are all installed and on latest. Weird.

Have you checked the requirements page? It's only supported on certain processors.

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360043484511

Ah crap, i was sure i had a 4c CPU, but it's actually a 2core, 4thread one. That explains everything. Funnily enough on Windows 2 cores are enough.

Chrome on Linux here. Google Meet blurs my background just fine.

Not on Firefox though for some reason. Is there some special API only Chrome implements?

Nope, no special API what so ever. In fact there's even a Firefox add-on that makes it work[0], Google Meet just doesn't target more than Chromium with this feature.

If you try using it, they'll redirect you here[1], and tell you to:

> Check if your browser supports WebGL 2.0 at webglreport.com and verify that “Major Performance Caveat” is marked as “No”.

...but clicking on that site from Firefox shows WebGL 2.0 support and "Major Performance Cavet" is indeed marked as "no". That being said, simply changing the user agent to Chrome also doesn't work.

So in conclusion, I end up using Chromium a few hours per week purely for Google Meet's blurry backgrounds, and I use Firefox for everything else.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mercator-stud...

[1] https://support.google.com/meet/answer/10058482?hl=en&expand...

Any reason not to use the add-on you mention in [0] instead of falling back to Chromium?

Not really, I'm just used to this workflow. I've tried it, it works, and then went back to Chromium for this use case out of habit.

Played with the extension, it does not seem to enable this feature: the option appears, but then there's an error message. Although the other features are fun.

It works for me on Chrome but I had to use Wayland (not Xorg) and then force enable GPU rendering because it's currently blacklisted for Wayland. Possibly relatedly to that blacklist every couple of days (even with rebotos) new tabs in an existing browser window stop rendering content and I have to quit and reload. That doesn't seem to happen on Xorg/without GPU.

Kinda. Google uses the WebAssembly SIMD extension for their segmentation. Not sure if they have a fallback on Firefox, but if they do, it most likely won't perform the same way.

Firefox has had WASM SIMD for a few months now, it was enabled by default in FF89.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1695585

Thank you! I am going to try this today asap and test with Zoom. I heavily use Zoom for work and this is something lacking in Linux client

Zoom now supports this on Linux natively as of a new release a couple of weeks back.

Yep, and Google Meet always has for me (about half a year of using it).

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