Microsoft's Link to Windows app could soon gain functionality that lets you use your Android phone as a webcam. Read on to learn more!
  • @[email protected]English
    21•10 months ago

    If you’re in Linux and you want the same thing right now, scrcpy already offers to expose your cellphone’s camera as a video4linux device. See here:

    https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/blob/master/doc/v4l2.md

    I use it every once in a while when I do a presentation in Teams at work and I need one webcam to show my mush, and another to demonstrate whatever device I’m presenting: I use the cellphone to capture close-ups of the device and focus on features people ask me to show, scrcpy sends the camera capture to a v4l2 device, and Teams uses the v4l2 device as a regular video source.

    Super useful!

    • fatboy93English
      3•10 months ago

      Not really an open-source approach, but I found that irium Webcam is generally a lot better if you’re just wanting to use your phone as one.

      For some reason scrcpy just doesn’t work well for me.

    • atocci
      3•10 months ago

      I guess it needs a cable though, and Phone Link is wireless?

      • OtterEnglish
        1•10 months ago

        Yea I guess so, I’d be curious about the latency from that

        • atocci
          2•10 months ago

          My Asus laptop came with their own version of this preinstalled. I had to install the corresponding app on my phone, but when I tried it out, I had no noticeable amount of latency for anything you would use a webcam for. It was over a relatively fast WiFi 6 connection though.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•10 months ago

      Does GrapheneOS not support this? I am not seeing a Webcam option under Use USB for

      EDIT: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/8672-phone-as-webcam/3

      Seemingly it is still a pending feature, that will be included with the December quarterly feature release (“QPR1”). The only people who are using it now on their phones are running QPR1 betas, which I think first began releasing in September.

    • DandroidEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      KDE connect has been really buggy for me since my most recent Linux install. I can’t even send texts unless I use the command line. And it has to redownload all my texts every time I reopen the app.

      At least I get notifications 100% of the time, which is the most important use case for me.

    • @BluefruitEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      I was curious if someone was gonna mention KDE connect. From what i saw it looked pretty good though i havent used it myself.