[ghostly_s]

I use a similar trick + gphoto to use my digital camera as a webcam, works great even on my old hardware:

    gphoto2 --stdout --capture-movie | ffmpeg -i - -vcodec rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p -threads 0 -f v4l2 /dev/video10

[izoow]

I'd sometimes use my Android phone as a webcam by running an app like "IP Webcam" that exposes a video stream of the camera feed and then using the video stream as input for ffmpeg.