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Comment by villgax | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is not having first party solution to use our damn phones as webcams across PCs/Macs natively, without resorting to flaking IP cam software or virtual loopback devices which are laggy if they work.

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[Disclaimer: Author of Telecast here]

I've been working on an MacOS and iOS app to do just this if you have an older iPhone lying around. https://telecast.camera/

I've been using it to record multicam music performances/practice sessions as I didn't have an expensive DSLR. The latency of other solutions was too high to easily sync guitar strumming and audio-in from an audio interface.

I'd love feedback! Things like the linked network are of interest, as I'd like to add support for background replacement in the future, too.

If you want to transmit the camera stream wirelessly in real time that effectively makes the phone an IP cam, with all the flakiness that often entails. It's not an easy problem.

I'm also not quite sure which problem is being solved by using your phone as a webcam. Actual webcams are quite cheap and come with way better mounting hardware than your phone. And for freehand videos like in the paper the realtime requirement isn't very common, and if it's there it's usually sufficient to do the processing on the phone and stream directly from there. There has to be something I'm not seeing?

Part of it is that webcams are nearly impossible to buy since the pandemic arose, but apart from that, webcam image quality is terrible - even expensive webcams in the price range of ~100's of Euro.

A recent iPhone will wipe the floor with any webcam I've come across, short of an SLR or mirrorless camera.

It may be a little-used feature nowadays, but you can still transfer data using your phone's charging port.

And what about Bluetooth, are BLE cameras also flaky? (I'm sure classic Bluetooth cameras are.)

For what it's worth, the NDIHX software works well on iPhone and Mac through OBS, and is at least available on Windows.

I'd like Macs to have an official loopback device so video effects wouldn't have to be implemented in every program separately. For example an overlay that worked in Facetime/Zoom/Teams/etc.

Isn't that sort of how SnapCamera and the like work today? You give the physical camera to Snap, which does the video processing and then creates a virtual camera device that you can select as your camera in in zoom. It's not exactly as you describe (and FaceTime doesn't respect/offer it), but Zoom doesn't have to implement the effects and can use the device still.

Yes, but it's fragile. Zoom has disabled whatever permission is needed for a virtual camera in the past, and I think Skype requires modifying the binary to enable it. The OBS virtual camera seems to work well now, but that's a recent change and I'm not sure I trust it to keep working on new versions of macos.

I agree! Recently I have been wondering if there is any reason why for example Android devices with a camera don't implement the USB video class specification, except for the reason that nobody cared enough.

Even low end android phones take selfie video of way better quality than any built in laptop Web cam I've had experience with. Also unless you spend 200eu for the top end cams you won't get near that quality. At 200eu you can actually get a pretty decent mobile phone like oneplus nord which also has a decebt camera.

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