Zorin OS - Remote Desktop Manager - xFreeRDP - Allow Webcam
Hello everyone,
This week-end i decided it was the time to finally jumpship to Linux and decided after reading a few articles to give a go to Zorin OS.
So far the experience is amazing, and i was able to figure out most of the quirk i needed to make my everyday driver to be Zorin.
There is 1 issues i am attempting to fix, and it's to let my webcam be used by xfreerdp when i am RDP to my work computer.
I am using Remote Desktop Manager (Installed using the terminal) And i seems to either be missing the option (Nothing in Local devices and ressources) or a way to add a custom cli command (Such as /usb-device:video).
Is there anybody that got able to passtrough the webcam in a rdp sessions that has some pointers in how to fix this ?
All Comments (4)
Hello malabriebelair,
At the moment, it isn’t possible to use a webcam with our current freerdp implementation, which is used when launching the connection in “Embedded” or “Undocked” mode. However, we’ve created a ticket to add this feature, and we’ll let you know once it’s implemented.
As a workaround, you can launch the connection in “External” mode and use a custom installation path where you can add the argument you need. Here’s an example:
Let us know if that helps.
Regards,
Gabriel Dubois
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Hello Gabriel,
Thank you for your reply, any ETA on this feature to be added ?
Hello
When I looked at this briefly I hoped it was something we could add for 2026.1; but I may need to revise that estimate after taking a more detailed look today.
The problem is that to build the RDPECAM channel we need to pull in some extra dependencies, and one of those (that's a hard requirement) is `swscale` or the complete `ffmpeg` (`swscale` is a component of ffmpeg). There's the problem: ffmpeg is licensed as either GPL or LGPL. LGPL code is compatible with RDM but in order to comply, I need freerdp to be able to load the library dynamically (i.e. the user must supply ffmpeg at runtime). That requires some changes upstream in freerdp. It's not impossible - the same logic is already done for OpenH264, for example - but it's also not as simple as just enabling the feature and shipping it.
I'll still aim for supporting this in 2026.1 as I think it's a worthwhile feature, but it might be later than that. It almost certainly won't be any sooner. 2026.1 should ship in March.
Please, let me know if you have any questions or comments
Kind regards,
Richard Markievicz
Hi Richard,
Thank you for your reply, i am glad that it is being looked upon and will wait for the implementation whenever is ready!
Have a good rest of your day