Howto: use your iPhone as webcam in Linux (without WebcamStudio)

So this is the story - my laptop (yes it's a bit of a relic) doesn't come with a webcam. While I do have one of those tiny USB webcams, it has never been very reliable. It sucks in low-light, and the resolution is shitty at best - and don't even get me started on those wires. As is the case with many such stories, necessity thus drove me to find this nifty little solution.

I found a nice little app on the AppStore called iWebCamera which sounded like it could do just the trick! according to their website, iWebCamera could stream the images/video from you iPhone's camera to your computer. The catch here of course, is that you need their "driver" software installed on the computer. This is all fine..if you're on a Mac or Windows machine. Linux users aren't completely left out though, as the very handy "WebcamStudio" does support iWebCamera. However, the problem is that the current version (0.56 at the time of writing) doesn't support v4l2 (which I needed for skype compatibility)

*note; v4l2 support in WebcamStudio is coming in the next release. You're welcome to wait until it comes out. I did it this way because I didn't need the extra features WebCam studio.

let's get started after the break!




This tutorial is based on Ubuntu 10.10 running kernel 2.6.35-22-generic and relies on gstreamer

First you'll obviously need iWebCamera installed. Then you'll need to know the ip-address of your iPhone (which you can find in settings). Did I mention that this only works over WiFi?

next on your linux machine, get ready to compile some stuff!

grab the dependencies

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libtool autoconf mercurial gstreamer-tools git

after that, you'll need to grab both the V4l2 Loopback drivers, and the corrosponding helper utility.

hg clone https://v4l2loopback.googlecode.com/hg/ v4l2loopback
git clone http://github.com/umlaeute/gst-v4l2loopback.git

first we compile the loopback driver and install it

 cd v4l2loopback && make
sudo make install

If everything went well, you should be able to load the kernel module

sudo modprobe v4l2loopback

If you were successful, you should have a new loopback video device at /dev/video0 or /dev/video1 etc...

next, we compile and install the gstreamer sink

cd ../gst-v4l2loopback && ./autogen.sh
make && sudo make install

now if everything went well, you should be able to do a "gst-inspect v4l2loopback" and get a description of the v4l2loopback gstreamer plugin.

That's all for the compiling. Now all you have to do is guide the webcam stream from the phone through a gstreamer pipeline (and hence through appropriate decoders) all the way to the v4l2loopback sink.

gst-launch souphttpsrc location=http://192.168.1.11:8080/strm ! jpegdec ! ffmpegcolorspace ! v4l2loopback device=/dev/video0

where 192.168.1.11 is the ip address of your iphone on the network, and /dev/video0 is your loopback device. If everything went according to plan you should now be able to use the "iPhone webcam" for skype and other programs.

This path offers massive flexibility and configurability. You could push the stream through some effectv plugins to get all sorts of cool animations and effects. You could also stream movies,videos,screencasts etc over skype. I'd like to see them do THAT in windows :)