Use any device with a camera and a web browser as a web camera. The camera shows up as any other web camera on the host Linux machine.
Status: Very early.
To build PhoneCam, run:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/mortie/phonecam.git
cd phonecam
make BUILD_TYPE=release -j 8
A build will take a long time because the build script will first download and compile Google's WebRTC library. On my system, this takes about 1 hour and 40 minutes (though that's using a spinning rust drive for space reasons; I assume it would be significantly faster on an SSD).
WebRTC also takes a lot of space (around 16 GB). You can make the build script
download and build WebRTC into a different directory by replacing the make command
above with:
make BUILD_TYPE=release WEBRTC_PATH=/destination/path -j 8
For example, I build with this command to put WebRTC on my external hard drive
(which is mounted in /mnt/HDD):
make BUILD_TYPE=release WEBRTC_PATH=/mnt/HDD/data/phonecam-rtc -j 8
(This stuff doesn't work yet, because PhoneCam is far from done. This section describes how it's intended to work when it's done.)
After building, you will have a self-contained executable in build/$BUILD_TYPE/phonecam
(for example build/release/phonecam if you built with BUILD_TYPE=release).
Run that program:
./build/release/phonecam
It will tell you your IP address and port number (for example 10.0.101.29:8080).
Now, navigate to https://<IP>:<port> (for example https://10.0.101.29:8080)
on your phone/tablet/laptop/whatever you want to use as a webcam.
Next, accept whatever warning your browser shows; PhoneCam creates a self-signed HTTPS certificate.
Next, click the "connect" button in the browser. It should now start streaming video from its camera to your Linux host, and its output should be available as a web camera.
Building WebRTC provides a lot of options. Most of the time, you probably don't
need to change anything, but if you want to change something (for example,
if you're cross compiling, or don't want proprietary codecs, or want to use
WebRTC's toolchain instead of your host system's), you can change the options
given to gn gen by changing gn_args in webrtc/build.sh.
To re-run GN and ninja for webrtc, run make build-webrtc.