Video chat background swapping

On July 14, 1995, the movie “ Under Siege 2: Dark Territory ” appeared on the cinema screens (in the Russian box office - “ Capture 2: Dark Territory ”). One of the characters in this film - the evil genius computer geek Travis Dane - created a video of his face against a substitute background so that the real location of the terrorists could not be established (he used a photograph of the Eiffel Tower in Paris for this purpose).

Fifteen years have passed.

Today you do not need to be a computer genius to replace the background in your video chat. Both in Chatroulette, and in Skype, and in the Smotri.com video profiles, many do this. However, the more I see such tricks, the more often I see the name of the program WebcamMax on top of them. In general, this is not surprising: this program is paid , and in the demo version a non-switchable “banner” is superimposed over the video. But why can't video chat lovers find and use the free analogue of it? I am a hater of banner ads, so I would like all of these people to use other software.
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I appeal immediately through Habrahabr in order to recommend ManyCam in plain text to everyone - a good program, freeware, which has sufficient abilities to replace the background during video chat with any photo or mobile video from a file. It is available not only for Windows, but also for Mac.

When filmmakers mount modern movies on a computer, they also massively replace the background , and they need a special monochrome, monochromatic screen of an unnatural blue or light green color for this (it is also called “chroma key ” from the English chromakey) . However, in video chat, in contrast to the film, the shooting is carried out with a still camera, so (judging by ManyCam allowance ) it is enough to give a command to the computer, and to get out of the camcorder’s own sight so that the computer captures an arbitrary authentic background of the video chat and could later replace it whatever else desired.