Turn your phone into a wireless webcam | Hacker News Reader

Turn your phone into a wireless webcam

kinoni.com

166 pointsdsr1254 comments

I used this a while back to record, and the free version has some major limitations (low res, wrong aspect ratio, can only use selfie cam). It did work well, but they don’t mention any of these limitations on this pitch page. The resolution lowering actually made the video quality significantly worse (some kind of sharpening or something?) made the lighting look really unnatural. Was trying to use iPhone with obs on Mac to record.

It is strange that they don't link to the pro versions on their page.

Feature Comparison: https://www.kinoni.com/support-and-instructions/#Provsfreeve...

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/epoccam-webcamera-for-computer...

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kinoni.web...

That feels like a total advert; so in that vein I had better results with Mobiola than EpocCam, and Mobiola have software which allows use of a phone as a wireless headset and microphone, which is also neat. (Haven't used it in a long time, might not be current).

I am quite surprised that plugging different bits of software and hardware together is still such an "odd" thing to do. It makes so much sense to have a smartphone, use the camera for two minutes, and then say "wish I could look through this from my desktop" or "wish I could play sound out of my phone headphones" or "wish I could use the touch screen as a mousepad on my desktop" or "wish I could use my laptop/table as a second screen" or etc.

So much hardware, sensors, input and output devices all isolated into their own islands, it's a shame. Over the years I've picked up bits of 3rd-party software to do things like proxy a serial connection or audio connection over ethernet, or use a keyboard and mouse on multiple computers, or use another computer as a second screen, and have occasionally wondered about a connection-graph website for "I have X and Y, what cables, dongles, adapters and software can connect them together?".

In Mac OS you can record video from your iPhone in Quicktime (screen record), but you can't stream the video from the camera. It would be really great if Apple allowed that.

edit: I just found a free app by the same developer which allows just that! Yay

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/telecast-camera-usb-webcam/id1...

I feel that the ideal situation is your streaming platform offering a first-party app on iOS. I believe YouTube and Facebook already have this, but Twitch doesn't.

Yesterday I came across https://obs.camera/ which is not affiliated with OBS but claims to work with OBS using NewTec‘s NDI streaming protocol. Haven‘t tried but put it high on my list as this seems to be a super-easy and affordable way to build a set with multiple camera angles if you need to. If it works well and lag / latency is OKish this is a cheap alternative to external cameras with HDMI capture cards. Does anyone have experience with OBS.camera?

Yes it works and the NDI apps were (are?) free in April

Yeah the NDI stuff works for me. I get a virual webcam that I can use in Zoom, that connects to the NDI app on my phone. And it also works in OBS too.

Nice high quality and a reasonable amount of control in the app.

We use Teams at work and there’s a feature called companion mode [0] that allows you to join a meeting from multiple devices, so you can use your pc microphone for audio and your phone for video.

0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/wall-of-fame/companio...

Has anyone compared this to DroidCam? Is it faster/lower lag?

I'd say it's a bit better. I've been using DroidCam as a third camera in my remote guitar lesson OBS setup, and it's been OK, and I think this would be much the same (using an old phone - MotoG5 - as webcams are like gold dust at the moment).

An upside of this is that it doesn't need another piece of software running on the Windows machine - the driver effectively does it, unlike DroidCam which needs the program running on the PC to work.

Also, you can change the resolution directly in OBS, and I've just set it up at 1920*1080 which seems to work fine, and gives a better quality image.

Lag seems similar on both, but I've not tested it other than visually - no measurement made...

Android users - IP Webcam / DroidCam, over USB with adb port forwarding is a great option.

I've found that IP Webcam functions fairly well as a standards-based H.264/RTSP video stream to feed to anything that can take a rtsp feed. Such as for a hacked up DIY home security camera system.

Interesting info, thank you.

Searching around for RTSP, I found that it's possible to stream to WebRTC.

Kurento media server - https://github.com/Kurento/kurento-media-server

RTSP/HTTP URI to WebRTC example - https://github.com/lulop-k/kurento-rtsp2webrtc

I've used DroidCam over USB and for me it was slower than over wifi.

What do you mean by adb port forwarding?

I used it for a short while and found the free versions framerate was worse than droidcam (paid) and occasionally it would give up the ghost all together and require a restart. droidcam also does this but less frequently. It did handle switching between a device with low res camera and one with high which droidcam cannot do. I wouldnt say either is significantly better than the other but i went back to droidcam edit: droidcam also has a low framerate mode that prevents excessive battery use

I use DroidCam over USB, works great but phone tends to overheat.

Does anyone know of comparable software that works well on linux?

I used to have a nice bash script I could call from my Nokia N900 that would pipe gstreamer over ssh, execute a script on the remote desktop PC to create a new video device and use the phone cam as a webcam.

Dangerous, root-level stuff but it worked a dream.

Can still do basically the same with SailfishOS, though for some reason you need to open an audio context before starting gstreamer first.

I've used DroidCam with mostly good results. (I think the last time I tried it out wouldn't work but previously it had worked well)

Droidcam pro was excellent to me.

Worked for me too!

The only downside was (on Arch) having to recompile to update the v4l2loopback_dc kernel module after ever kernel update.

I've since moved on to a regular webcam though.

I used Droidcam over USB for the past few months. To improve image quality I set up a virtual camera in OBS that would take the source from droidcam, allow me to add effects and then view it as a video input in zoom or similar programs.

I think I found that solution through a video by tuxfoo.

Bad idea to have your smartphone as your long hour meetings webcam. Mainly it will drain the battery fast and will make it hot, meaning in long term will shorten its life. This is only recommended in emergency situations, not as your default daily setup.

You can plug it in?

My phone drained faster than it could charge with a laptop USB C charger and modern phone supporting fast charge. I eventually relented and just got a webcam, but it was a nice idea to have one fewer gadget.

Seems more likely that fast charging did not work than that the phone uses >15W sustained to power the webcam?

Installed app on iOS. Drivers MacOS. Tried WiFi and cable.

None of them worked.

I had the same issue. Rebooting my Mac fixed it, strangely.

I've tried all of the commercial phone -> webcam solutions I found that the camera isn't as good as the native software, because the vendor uses some software magic to improve the image quality. The image tends to be very grainy, especially with poor lighting.

Is there a technical reason that none of this software can present a UVC camera to the computer directly?

Did you try NDI?

Where do you see low quality, on the local monitor, or remotely? It's true that the processing and compression means the remote site gets a low quality picture regardless of a good input. But a good input is a good starting point, and if you have good bandwidth, and low latecy (no wifi) then you can get a good quality video stream.

One thing - if you are streaming video from your phone constantly like that it will get toasty

I think that's well-within the iPhone's design specs - people stream for hours with their phones with no special cooling attached.

I just know from experience using "IP Webcam" from the Android market causes my Pixel 2 XL to overheat in a case real fast.

That might be because it is serving all the content as well, though.

edit - reading this page more though and it is clearly designed for iOS with Android being an afterthought. Since Android doesn't support USB and has to stream by WiFi, well I am pretty sure the Android phones will get hot as they are then running some sort of video processing/compression locally

The latest iPhones actually have faster Wifi (650 Mbps) than they have USB (480 Mbps), so I bet the compression is the same.

Maybe the android version isn’t using hardware compression correctly?

You can run something like Spydroid or "IPCam demo" from the fdroid store, to turn a phone into an IP webcam. I used an old Moto Z with LineageOS as a webcam for a while there, against a linux host.

Took a bunch of messing around, but it worked well.

This seems to work okay. Took me a couple weeks to get an invite.

https://reincubate.com/camo/

If this is gratis software why is it not opensourced?

How is the latency for this stuff? Every time I look into something like this the latency is so high it's borderline unusable.

Using NDI and connecting to an iPhone over USB, I found the latecy to be pretty low, but still there.

Interestingly on a zoom call a few weeks ago I ended up on a call twice, once from my iPhone, and once from the mac. I had a headphone from each in one ear. Sometimes the iPhone would be ahead by 0.5 or 1 second. But then within a minute the Mac would be ahead. So zoom is streaching out the audio to adapt to network latecy, I guess.

It‘s sad that a GoPro Hero5 Session camera can not stream video via USB.

I have a gopro clone 'eken H9R' which does exactly this, bought it for €20 euro's from a local sort of craigslist.

If you plug it into your PC without an SD card inserted it will act as a webcam perfectly.

Did this 10 years ago but the phone could not keep up even when plugged in... Probably would work ok with newer, more efficient phones

I would love something like this which could turn my old iPhone into a home surveillance camera.

I can recommend https://alfred.camera, it has a particularly handy "push to talk" feature that I use to scare our cat.

I'm an Android guy so I can't vouch for them personally, but there are tons of results for "iphone ip camera" that seem to be what you want.

Been using this since my MBP webcam died. Works well, doesn't seem to lag much.

Anyone here familiar with or have a link for a *nix friendly solution?

Thanks!

Is this support Linux?

Nope.

Almost every single static asset for this site is blocked by my ad blockers.

I block 1.5 million ad domains and I had no problems

Just run Firefox:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23762709

Reply on news.ycombinator.com