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Comment by sjs7007 | Hacker News Reader

If you have an iPhone+mac you can use continuity camera which is pretty seamless in comparison: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213244

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There are lots of solutions that are more seamless than the DSLR, but which are vastly more expensive, including just buying a webcam proper. But the fact that you _can_ use the DSLR as your webcam is cool, and may save some folks money if they happen to have a DSLR laying around.

The problem with buying a webcam proper is that the industry has reached a "good enough" point where manufacturers will re-release essentially the same camera with no real improvements in resolution, hardware, or software.

I bought a Logitech webcam during the pandemic. Imagine my surprise when the webcam resolution was worse than the one built into my XPS 13.

The XPS has a 1080p camera. Were you trying to buy a 4K webcam and accidentally bought the super cheap 720p Logitech sells?

Opal C1, Instalink, continuity cam/droidcam, and a DSLR/mirrorless setup like in this article are essentially your upgrade options if you don’t want to pay for a 4k Logitech.

This is frustrating, I thought that the pandemic was going to create a demand for high quality webcams. I'd settle for a 4K phone quality. I bought the Logitech Brio thinking I'd get better picture than my phone (since it's a dedicated camera), which was a bit of a disappointment. I don't think it's terrible, but I had higher expectations of it.

thats exactly how i feel over the brio, picture is greate but i hoped for more

Smartphone's outer camera quality is what every manufacturer invest much now. It looks impossible to compete with, unless the sensor and lens are big.

There is DroidCam which works with an Android phone and Linux. The set-up is straightforward and it works great.

https://www.dev47apps.com/

Mine keeps disconnecting after a few seconds. DroidCam has never worked well for more than a minute for me.

Wish there was a FOSS alternative.

Not FOSS, but try also IP Webcam, it gives you a MJPEG stream and you can set it up on your computer.

I use https://github.com/agarciadom/ipwebcam-gst as a way to turn the MJPEG into a video device.

I've created PTP Webcam [1] during COVID to get DSLRs working for video conferencing on the Mac.

[1] https://ptpwebcam.org/

This works better than the Canon EOS Webcam utility for me, even though my DSLR isn't officially supported. It works fine in Zoom. Unfortunately it doesn't work in Quicktime. I'll take a look at some of the code signing info in your docs and see if I can fix it.

My understanding is that Quicktime Player has been in the SIP domain for recent OS releases, so it just won't load 3rd party libraries at all :/

If you have {Windows, Mac Linux} and {Android, iOS}, you can use Iriun: https://iriun.com

I kept trying to get this to work and failing. If others run into problems like me, note that this feature requires macOS Ventura, release last month.

If you have an iPhone and Windows PC, iVCam works great.

Similarly, I can recommend Reincubate Camo, works on macOS/Linux/Windows. It also has plenty manual camera settings to play around with to get the exact view you want, including focus/white balance/exposure/cropping and tons more that the Apple's official continuity functionality lacks.

Disclaimer: zero affiliation with the product (outside of being their happy customer). I simply found it way before the official continuity feature was even announced for macOS+iOS.

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