[How to] Use your Android Phone as a web cam for your laptop?

There are lots of applications available in the Android market to use your Android phone as a web cam for your laptop. Android application “USB Webcam” has been my personal favorite so far. But, the “USB Webcam” project is sort of dead now. “DroidCam Wireless Webcam” is another application which comes close to “USB Webcam”. It works over WiFi and streams your phone’s camera output to your computer. DroidCam allows you to configure the camera settings - Width, Height and Frame rate. However, the video quality of DroidCam is not as good as USB Webcam.

Steps to setup your Android phone as a webcam:

1. On your phone, install the application “DroidCam Wireless Webcam” from the Android market. The size of the application is around 100 KB.
2. On your PC, download the latest version of Windows component from here. Extract the zip file and execute the installer file (DroidCam.exe). Admin privileges are required to install and register DroidCam windows driver. Open any application (for eg Skype) that uses WebCam. This will automatically start the windows component. You may have to disable your Firewall for the application to work.
3. Open the application on your phone. Click on Connect > Add new PC. Specify the IP address of your PC and a human readable name for it. Save the settings and click on the name / IP address to connect to your PC.
4. You are all set here. Any application which uses the camera will take the video feeds from the “DroidCam” windows component.

DroidCam supports Windows XP / Vista / 7 and also 64-bit Windows. It has support for Linux as well. MAC version will be available soon. Read more about DroidCam from here.

Similar apps: USB Webcam, IP Webcam (supports multiple view options)

-- Varun