Full ack on that last part. I got a new laptop from my employer a few months ago and the angle is so wide, I have trouble not having something like a drying rack or other unprofessional stuff in the background. It's still on my to-do list to look for a way to crop the image, and manual quality control would also be a welcome feature.
That's not to say that I don't see the use-case for good quality. The "360p ought to be enough for anyone", as you say, really is fairly crappy, and if you're doing some announcement for an audience you care about, where you're in full view on everyone's screen, it would be nice to have a bit better quality than that.
(Or for science/hacking: I use my phone camera for a ton of things from capturing the night sky to the ~1000 fps slow motion feature. If webcams had similar "gimmicks", I'd probably make use of it, also because webcams are connected to a machine where coding is a lot easier than on a phone, so I can more easily do something meaningful with the image stream. But I realize I'm the outlier here.)
> It's still on my to-do list to look for a way to crop the image, and manual quality control would also be a welcome feature.
OBS with virtual camera. Add the camera as a source, scale and crop to your heart's content, click 'start virtual camera', then launch your videoconferencing software and choose the virtual camera.
Thanks! I already glanced at my options and this one seemed like overkill, but yeah it does sound like the go-to solution that everyone uses. Will be installing this some time soon, thanks for confirming this is the way to go :) (Also to the sibling comment)
On linux you may be able to set it up with fmpeg and v4l2loopback (create a v4l2loopback device and have ffmpeg grab your input, crop it, and output to that device).
Maybe less overkill, but probably more involved to set up though so OBS is probably your best choice unless it is really too heavy.
You could use OBS studio to crop the image. It takes your webcam as an input and creates a virtual cam that works with every conferencing software I've tried. (It can also use your phone camera with the aid of the DroidCam OBS app.)
That's not to say that I don't see the use-case for good quality. The "360p ought to be enough for anyone", as you say, really is fairly crappy, and if you're doing some announcement for an audience you care about, where you're in full view on everyone's screen, it would be nice to have a bit better quality than that.
(Or for science/hacking: I use my phone camera for a ton of things from capturing the night sky to the ~1000 fps slow motion feature. If webcams had similar "gimmicks", I'd probably make use of it, also because webcams are connected to a machine where coding is a lot easier than on a phone, so I can more easily do something meaningful with the image stream. But I realize I'm the outlier here.)