Use your Android Phone as a webcam

Retail webcams are overpriced. During the corona pandemic, the demand for webcams rose due to many people now working from home and needing a camera for their meetings. This led to a lot cheap, low quality webcams. These can be used for meetings, but you can only make out the person and they aren't useful for anything else.

But many people already have an electronic device at hand and may even use it to read this sentence. Your Smartphone. It is a very handy device and furthermore most have a pretty decent camera. So why buy an expensive webcam, with mid quality at best, when you could instead use your smartphone?

if you are living inside the apple ecosystem, apple already has a native solution for that. But for us independent folks on android (the clearly superior system (^^ ) ) I found a neat solution. There is the RemoteCam repository on GitHub which provides an impressive App that lets your smartphone stream its video input to your local network. This stream then you can use in OBS (A detailed tutorial is on the repositories website too). The app is minimalistic and put you right into the action. No loading screen, no ads, no nothing. You can choose the front/back camera you want to stream and the resolution. It is pretty neat.

All in all this app impressed me very much. The possibility to just use your Phone as an webcam and not having to buy another device which will eventually land in the trash is cool.