Comment 15 for bug 826265

The problem is Skype and Google Chrome are closed source. So you cannot patch them to use libv4l directly. Preloading the library by changing the .desktop files or replace the binary by a small wrapper script seems to be the sanest approach.

I you want libv4l preloaded to ALL processes on your system you could add it to /etc/ld.so.preload (see man ld.so). Maybe you can restrict it to just i386 ones. But IMHO this solution is worse than the one above.