And that without calling in twice. Laptop cameras as normally very crap. They say “1080p”, but most of the time they are 720p or less and have maybe 2 megapixels or less. Phones have way more and can be connected to the laptop via USB. There must be a way to use their camera over USB, right?

I know of USB over LAN, so surely this is possible.


Thanks to everybody. In the end I went with Scrcpy.

  • Riskable@programming.dev
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    22 days ago

    For a wifi option, you can use Droidcam with OBS. Setup the virtual camera inside OBS and you’ve got a wifi webcam that you can walk around with.

    I’ve used that setup many times and it’s sweet. At work my coworkers are all astonished and amazed when I use the OBS virtual camera pass-through to my virtual desktop to walk around while talking (I use a wireless headset for the audio). I can even show various overlays of my desktop with my face and a downcam I have setup for demonstrations (like a craft cam setup).

    Combine it with RVC voice changing silliness and they’re all blown away. The security folks (of which I’m a part, haha) always freak out a little bit when they see me share my Linux desktop when I’m on Teams via the company’s virtual desktop. “That shouldn’t be possible!” Haha

    I don’t have the heart to show them how you can copy and paste huge amounts of text into the virtual desktop directly (clipboard sharing is disabled and prohibited 🤣).

    • onlinepersona@programming.devOP
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      8 hours ago

      My phone is kinda recent and has Android 18, but it didn’t work. Maybe future versions of Android will add it for all. That’d be cool!

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    22 days ago

    Macs can do this with iPhones… natively. I can tell either of my Macs to take a picture from my iPhone, and it’ll just do it. I’m not sure why that is a thing (e.g. if my iPhone isn’t in my hand, it’s not pointing at anything I want a shot of), but it is. Also, they make clips that attach the iPhone to the top of the Mac(Book) and point the screen away from you, letting its 2-3 cameras point at you, looking over the screen at you.

    So if Apple does it, the big Android/Windows/Linux players want to make it an option, too. Fortunately this has been a thing (on the Apple side) for a couple years now, so, even before I skimmed the comments, I thought, “I should fucking hope so.”

    • onlinepersona@programming.devOP
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      8 hours ago

      That’s where I got the idea. I saw some tech youtube doing it and thought “hmmm… android must have an app for this… surely”. Lo and behold, there are a few.