video(4) landed. "No webcam driver" is dead.

From: Abdelkader Boudih <freebsd_at_seuros.com>
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:40:37 UTC
For years, the go-to move for dodging a video call was "well, I run FreeBSD, and there's no webcam driver, so." 

Camera stays off, nobody questions it, everyone assumes a serious systems person and not someone hiding from a standup. That excuse is now retired.
By Adrian Chadd, Baptiste Daroussin, and me.
We did this. On purpose. I don't know what we were thinking.

video(4) is a new kernel-side capture framework:
a common device model for things that produce frames, instead of every capture driver reinventing /dev/videoN from scratch.

 Initial consumers:
 • uvideo(4): USB Video Class webcams, converted onto the new framework. Most of the hard logic here was already done for us - OpenBSD's Robert Nagy and Marcus Glocker wrote the original driver years ago, Baptiste ported it to FreeBSD.
 • fwcam(4): Apple firewire camera. work perfectly for me, but Australian mode (upside down) for Adrian.
Where its been tested: 
 • across basically the whole Apple fleet here : MacBooks, iMacs, Every one of those machines is now missing exactly one thing (WiFi, still catching up on some chipsets). 
 • Also tested on regular Laptops with integrated webcams, which mostly just worked .
Diffs for the design: D58367-D58369 

What's coming next:
 • PCI capture cards - the "I have a real capture card, not a webcam".
 • SBC-class cameras (think Raspberry Pi camera modules) - CSI-ish targets, for anyone doing embedded/SBC work on FreeBSD
I'd love it if you:
 • Threw a UVC device at uvideo(4) that has those non generic cameras. (especially 2k, 4k, thermal cameras, ect).
 • Have an firewire webcam
*Once a few more hackers have tested this, I will post it to freebsd-current@.*

As for meetings: the next generation of excuse is already in production. "Sorry, can't turn my camera on, I'm running TempleOS this week, it's between me and God." Untestable & Unfalsifiable. Nobody's going to ask follow-up questions. You're welcome.

*Sent from HolyC Internet Missionary.*