The Android 14 webcam feature makes my $1,000 Pixel 8 Pro look like a cheap camera
The Android 14 webcam feature makes my $1,000 Pixel 8 Pro look like a cheap camera
My Pixel 8 Pro has an amazing camera, but you wouldn’t know it from using Android 14’s webcam feature.
Wait a year and your
$1000$650 Pixel 8 Pro will look like an even cheaper camera.I use the DroidCamX app with my Pixel 6 and Windows 10 laptop and it works great.
Yeah, I use their OBS version since I had a few issues with OBS and the normal one. My cat likes to sleep on my computer and I needed another camera to point at her when streaming... And then I realised I didn't need to buy one because I had old phones with good cameras in my desk drawer. Just got a cheap mount to hold my old xiaomi mi 9 SE. Looks fantastic, works well.
"Cheap camera manufacturers hate this trick"
It feels like we're finally, and thankfully, coming full circle. I remember buying my first digital camera in the early 2000s, specifically chosen because it was one of the many that included USB web camera functionality. Aside from downloading the photos on its internal storage, external storage was optional, you could also use the included software to serve as a webcam source.
I can't remember if it included a microphone, I'm thinking it didn't. It also ran off on those small stubby film camera batteries, and not off USB power from the cable you connected it to, which was kind of dumb, and made it expensive to use as a webcam. The video quality must have been something around 140p, and any kind of conference call software was garbage back then as well. Yet the premise of a single device having multi-use features was such a no-brainer, given you already had have the PC USB integration to use it as a point and shoot digital camera.
Modern smart phones have such excellent cameras, it felt really odd that you had to use a lot of hacky work arounds and reencoding over network streams to emulate the same functionality that some of the first affordable digital cameras on the market had decades prior. I spend some time looking into weather a custom Linux kernel could be used with Android to emulate the standard USB profile of a UVC camera device, but it's really nice to hear that this kind of functionality is being pushed through Android mainstream development.
https://github.com/tejado/android-usb-gadget
Guess it only took a pandemic and Apple to showcase the same functionality to spur the core Android development into gear to match feature parity.
Is this site cancer on Mobile? Or is that just me? I get highjacking ads that take me elsewhere and can't return to the site
No problem here, using browser embedded into Sync and no adblock
To be fair, the feature is still in beta.
I bet this is for compression for mobile networks. Saw those pictures on a phone screen and they looked fine. Plus, webcams just look like shit. Even if your Pixel 8 Pro is compressed as fuck, it's still gonna look better than most people's webcam.