Use Android phone camera as webcam for your pc

You don’t have a webcam or not satisfied with the webcam quality you have ? Here is the solution to your problem.

In this post i’ll show you guys, how you can turn your android phone camera into a webcam for pc or lappy. After reading it you”ll come to know how to use phone camera into a webcam.

You can use it for any purpose such as skype call,  gtalk, Yahoo!, Windows Live Messenger, etc.

There are some very good FREE apps in the market for this purpose such as Smartcam, IpWebcam and Droidcam. In this post i’ll show you how to set up SmartCam app and Ip Webcam app. these.

1) SmartCam App 

SmartCam App works with both wifi and bluetooth. It turns your Android phone into a handy webcam ready to use with your PC. SmartCam is more than a webcam, it’s a wireless webcam over WiFi/Bluetooth.

The steps for setting up and using this app are as followes:

• Download and install the SmartCam App

• Download the SmartCam Desktop app.

• Now we can connect SmartCam app to the pc via bluetooth or wifi. But i prefer wifi.

• Open SmartCam on your Android phone, press the menu button and it would show many options. Select Settings. Here, select TCP/IP (WiFi) as your Connection Type, and enter your local IP address of your computer under Remote server.

• Now, for finding the ip address of your pc/laptop, Go to Start > Run and type cmd in it. This would open command prompt window.

• In Command Prompt, enter ipconfig /all and then press enter. This would show a lot of info. Don’t worry Search for Wireless Lan adapter Wi-Fi. This is shown in the pic below.

• Now open the SmartCam app for your DESKTOP. 

• Make sure the connection type in the preferences pane is also set to use TCP/IP (WiFi).

• Turn on the wifi in your phone too.

• Launch the application on your phone and go to Menu -> ConnectWiFi.

• Now after 1 or 2 minutes the image of the phone camera would appear in the SmartCam application on your desktop. The video resolution and framerate would be clearly visible below the video stream.

• Now select SmartCam as the source in Skype or other platforms which you want to use.

That’s it 

2)  Ip Webcam

This application works only on Wi-Fi.

This app turns your phone into a network camera with multiple viewing options. View your camera on any platform with VLC player or web browser. Stream video inside WiFi network without internet access.Use IP Webcam with tinyCam Monitor on another android device or with third-party MJPG software, including video surveillance software, security monitors and mostaudio players.Videochat support (e.g. Skype, Chatroulette, only video stream for Windows only via an universal MJPG video streaming driver)

Here are the steps :

• Download the Ip Webcam app. Install it.

• Run the application from your phone and start the application from the setting menu by clicking on the “Start Server”. Once you on the camera mode, you can see the option “How to Connect” where you would see the the IP address that you have to use on the pc browser to connect the device with your PC.

• After entering the ip address in the browser, you will see instructions and a link to the video feed. Follow the instruction to setup your Android camera with your PC. Once the setup process is complete, your device will be connected to your PC.

• You also have the option to  change the video resolution, quality, photo resolution, focus mode of the camera from the IP webcam settings.

All this shows how to use phone camera as a webcam