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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. I for sure would've thought this would be a "20% time" app as lockdowns became common. Wyze figured out how to allow its security cameras to be used as webcams in March 2020! https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/31/21202022/wyze-firmware-up...

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Its like a 5 hour job to get something that technically works and then a 10,000 hour job to get something that works flawlessly. The Apple integration with the iphone and macbook is the most seamless setup I've seen so far but I've still gone back to just using the built in webcam because its too fiddly to put my phone up on the screen and occasionally have issues where it won't connect.

Phone as webcam just doesn't seem like a long term solution, eventually built in webcams will be cheap and good enough. And tbh I find the built in one on the macbook to be bordering on good enough once you consider how compressed and tiny the output will be on the other persons screen.

MVP to full product is definitely the bigger part of the work. In the environment of early COVID, I think an app that had some rough edges would've still been very useful. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that. Phone as webcam shouldn't exist at all (how do you even mount it?), but somehow the video and audio quality on phones is still years ahead of what's available on even high-end laptops.

Rough edge apps have been around for years. I tried one that worked in the browser and could connect to OBS on your laptop, it was just too cumbersome though.

Apple actually did come up with a good solution for mounting the phone. A small disk that connects to the iphone with magsafe and has a flip out tab that can hook on to the top of the macbook. It's surprisingly stable and nice.

As of last week, Apple now has FaceTime on Apple TV using an iPhone or iPad which is equally flawless in my test.

> eventually built in webcams will be cheap and good enough

We've been waiting what, 15 years for this to happen?

I had the opposite experience. I have a personal iPhone and a work iPhone and every time my work iPhone is near my work computer, it switches to it whether I want it to or not. It drives me nuts. It's fine when I want to initiate it but the number of times I've just set my work phone down on my desk thoughtlessly and then tried to start a video meeting in Slack or Teams or Zoom only to not have video because it's using the camera pointing at my desk is too many.

Canon also released an app during lockdown to make your DSLR or mirrorless camera into a webcam too. Shocking how quick companies can do things when a global pandemic pushes them after years of odd tethering and window screen capturing mess I've had with canon before hand for live streaming.

Sadly this app doesn't work with modern Macs and Canon had y their head in the same and refuses to address it.

I ended up getting a Sony mirrorless for a webcam. (Might seem like overkill but I spend a good deal of my time teaching in front of a camera.)

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