Originally posted on 2021-04-07
I really like the Lumix webcam software except for a few things:
- It's hard to find the download page
- It requires the camera's serial number to download
- It has an annoying splash screen that people always comment on
I figured the last one was something I could fix on my own and lo and behold I did it this morning with (hopefully) no ill effects. How did I do it? I'm glad you asked...
First, I figured that there had to be an image on disk that was either a PNG or a JPEG or something similar that held this splash screen. I dug into the Mac's root Library directory to find the plugin and I came across an interesting path CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/LUMIXWebcam.plugin/Contents/Resources/ready.jpg.
Then, I simply used ImageMagick to generate a black background with the same dimensions as a JPEG, backed up ready.jpg just in case the software validated its hash or contents, and then overwrote it with my new image like this:
cd CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/LUMIXWebcam.plugin/Contents/Resources
convert -size 1280x720 xc:black black.jpg
sudo convert -size 1280x720 xc:black black.jpg
sudo cp ready.jpg ready.jpg.bak
sudo cp black.jpg ready.jpgsudo was required here since the file is owned by root.
Finally, I fired up Photo Booth in MacOS and there's no more splash screen!
One weird problem I ran into though was that for applications that were already running like Zoom, Chime, etc. the splash screen didn't go away until I restarted them. As soon as I did that it all worked perfectly.