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.
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 🤣).
DroidCam is closed source, isn’t it?
P.S OBS is amazing.
Awesome, thanks! THis is what I went with.
Recent Android phones support UVC, which is the same protocol used by webcams. Pixels for example support it.
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!
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.”
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.





