Make your Mobile phone camera a Webcam

During this Corona virus Pandemic (Covid19), people have been asked to work for home and you will feel the need of having a webcam some or the other day. Teleconferencing gets easier when you see the other person face to face rather than having the voice converstation.
Not everyone has a laptop and not everyone has a Desktop PC with a Webcam. Now a days, not having a camera/webcamera is a big deal. Attending Zoom Calls,Skype Calls, Facebook Live streams and many other applications and website demands you to have a webcam.
When I say a webcam , its just a camera which can stream you over internet, hence the name 'web camera' aka webcam.

So, here I am going to tell you about a simple application that I have tried and tested to make your mobile phone as webcam and save money.
As I am talking about Skype video call, I think I should call this post of mine as "How to use Mobile phone as a webcam"


IP WEBCAM
This one is simple yet elegant application which you can install on your android phone from the Play Store.
IP Webcam 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.


Features include:
• Video can be uploaded directly to Dropbox, SFTP, FTP and Email using Filoader plugin
• Several web renderers to choose from: Flash, Javascript or built-in
• Video recording in WebM, MOV, MKV or MPEG4 (on Android 4.1+)
• Audio streaming in wav, opus and AAC (AAC requires Android 4.1+)
• Motion detection with sound trigger, Tasker integration.
• Date, time and battery level video overlay.
• Sensor data acquisition with online web graphing.
• Videochat support (video stream only for Windows and Linux via an universal MJPEG video streaming driver)
• Cloud push notifications on motion and sound, cloud recording for motion-triggered records, online video broadcasting powered by Ivideon.
• Extensive baby and pet monitor features: night vision, motion detection, sound detection.

Here is the link for IP WEBCAM. Install the app on your smartphone and Launch it.
There are plenty of things which are there in the mobile app, which you don't need to worry about.

Next Step is to Download the configuration software.
Download from https://ip-webcam.appspot.com/

After installing the PC app and launching it, below screen will be shown
Click on Auto Detect.



If everything works fine, the camera will be available in Windows software. If something is wrong, please check your firewall rules and your network by visiting your network camera in a web browser.

Try restarting your PC if it does not work.
After restart, launch any application
say Skype and you can then configure your skype with the IP Cam.
In Skype, Go to Tools - Options - Video Settings .
Here You need to choose, MJPEG Camera
And Baam!!! all done.

You can see your pretty cat over your PC by using your phone.

In the similar way, you can config any Streaming application . You just need to use MJPEG camera as a webcam source.

Another App I remember which you can use is, 

DroidCam. It also has mobile app and a PC connectivity software.

How to Charge mobile faster

Recently I came across with an nice android app called "Ampere".
Yes, it displays the current flowing into your mobile i.e while charging and also the amount of current being consumed by your smartphone while discharging.
With this app running on my mobile, I ran an small experiment.


Here are my observations,

Scenario	Charging or Not	Min Current	Max Current
Laptop - USB long cable	Laptop charging	770mA	840mA
Laptop - USB long cable	On battery	750mA	780mA
Laptop - USB Short Cable	On battery	1150mA	1180mA
Laptop - USB Short Cable	Laptop charging	1150mA	1180mA

The same goes when charging using the chargers.

With long USB cable the charging current was 890mA and with short USB cable it was 1460mA.

Charger rating was Input--0.6A, Output -- 6V- 2000mA

Its clearly seen,there is difference of 400mA  and that's a bummer if you use long USB cable.

It can be easily concluded from above table as well that using Short USB cable to charge will definitely decrease the  charging time i.e will charge your mobile or another device quicker.

And also, it does not  matter whether your laptop is charging or not the power being drawn from the USB port of laptop remains almost same.

You can also download the app from here Ampere Android app
and can understand how fast your mobile is charging with the cable you have or do you need to replace your usb charging cable.

How to directly Stream Movies using VLC

Everyone, now a days, prefer downloading a movie over the internet. But downloading and then watching a movie sometimes is not an option and then why would you want to keep the space occupied in your hard-disk when you would be watching it for only once.  What if, you want to quickly watch a movie without having a patience to download. Wouldn't that be great!
There is a sweet g33ktrick for doing that.
To start with, you need to have a VLC Player installed on your system.
You can download the player from here.

Now go to the website from where you are planning to download the movie /stream to watch. I've few links here consolidated which might help you.
Usually, websites have a separate download page/link for downloading. Go to that page.
And for downloading it, you usually click on "Download" button or "Right-Click" and then click on "Save Target As" to save the video.




So, instead of following these steps, you need to "Right-Click" on the link and then select "Copy Link Address".
Once you have this link address you can use it for streaming the video directly.
Now, Open VLC player and press "CTRL+N" to open the Network Protocol screen.
Paste the copied link over here and then
click on Play button.
Wait for few moment to start the stream.
Please note that if your network bandwidth is really good you wont have to wait for buffering the stream. Also, its not necessary to use VLC player if you know where to paste the magic streaming link in some other player.