Phone as Webcam

GrapheneOSEnjoyer

Since Android 14 was released, the feature to use your Phone as a Webcam has been implemented. But in GrapheneOS there was no such feature. Will it be implemented or is it not possible due to different circumstances.

Besides I really like GrapheneOS 😁

MajestyNL

Most of us like GrapheneOS big time! 🥳

tmcrnll

You could use droidcam. Don't think it's foss tho.

GrapheneOSEnjoyer

tmcrnll unfortunately Droidcam is neither Foss or has a good video quality, thats why i am interessted for that 🙂

AtavisticPuma

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.

GrapheneOSEnjoyer

AtavisticPuma Thank you for a such detailed answer 😊

taivlam

This feature should work on Tensor-based Pixel phones (so, Pixel 6 and newer, except the Pixel Tablet), according to what's been stated so far in this Google support page and another thread on the forum.

missing-root

Any update on this? I will try it in a moment

chenxiaolong

It works wonderfully--I use it nearly every day during meetings.

The only thing to be aware of is that switching to UVC (webcam) mode restarts the USB controller and it takes a few seconds to do so. Make sure you don't turn the screen off during that time or else GrapheneOS's USB port restriction feature will kick in.

missing-root

chenxiaolong

Strange, I tried it with OBS Flatpak and the Pipewire Input plugin and it detected the phone as webcam but didnt work at all.

Will try some other methods.

Update:

Using Fedora 40 Kinoite, and RPM Firefox, I enabled media.webrtc.camera-allow-pipewire in about:config and it works!

The UI was strange, Firefox only showed my USB camera but BigBlueButton allowed me to select the USB Webcam? Really strange but the result was great!

This works with and without enabling pipewire

chenxiaolong

missing-root Interesting. I'm also using OBS (not flatpak though), but with the V4L2 source. Might be worth giving that a shot.

missing-root

Okay it works in OBS using the normal V4L camera, not using the Pipewire one.

Meanwhile it doesnt work in KDE Kamoso, while it works in GNOME Snapshot.

This is pretty huge! The rotation is kind of an issue, but the video quality is of course great.

Turning on HD mode in the Webcam UI was a HUGE improvement. The quality before was pretty bad.

chenxiaolong

Nice! What kind of issues are you seeing with rotation? On my phone, the camera rotation follows the device rotation.

missing-root

chenxiaolong

Maybe I need to fix something with rotation on the phone then