Simulate a Webcam with Pictures (Or IP Camera)

[adciv]

The key thing to remember about webcams is they just send a series of still JPG images with some header information. It's nothing more complex than that. It wouldn't take much to write your own streaming service.

[billbo911]

It will depend on what you are using to open those images for processing on the Pi.
If you use OpenCV, it is as simple as using one command line to open an image vs another to grab a frame from a video stream.
I'm certain most other image processing code works almost identically.

For example, to grab a video frame, you could do this:

camera = cv2.VideoCapture(0)
# Later followed by this to grab the frame
(grabbed, frame) = camera.read()

To open a image file instead:

frame = cv2.imread(PathToImageFile)

[virtuald]

mjpg-streamer can send a stream from a directory of jpeg files.