USB WEBCAM, Its got to be possible

[ebarcus]

so I recently moved all my "electronics related activities" to "things in which I only really love to do" list thus needing to get rid of loads of electronics and go back to the linux i love... anywho

I want a Tech project and ive build Rom images for phones back in my younger days, seeing that there is fuss about no way to:
"Use my Droid as a USB WEBCAM" = Gaining access to the Camera on the droid thru its Proc files (correct?)

Also Ive been doing some research and it appears that in order to use libusb there would need to be support for it in the android driver files (this i hear you can learn how to rewrite from the official google android source code site?) saw a little bit on how to re write the display and "sensor" drivers (yet the camera was not listed as a sensor / this also means the camera was meant to operate separate from the more simpler sensors


another thing... while running TOP in the adb shell I saw the Proc pvrflip/0 which ive found a few threads elsewhere about this being used to stream video,
so somewhere among these pieces along with alot of work we can try to get the video from the droid streaming out of it as a true "webcam" seen and supported as a generic device on the users full sized lappy/desktop


lastly,

"Unless you know your driver requires libusb support, you should probably stick with the more conventional in-kernel support for USB devices" from The Webcam HOWTO seems to be the way to go im exploring both methods mentioned and after

   $  cat /proc/filesystems

we do have "usbfs" but not "usbdevfs"

lsmod

tiwlan_drv 689360 0 - Live 0xbf15c000 comes up but i just found out thats for the LAN


lets get some comments on this so I get better leads, need sleep must work and code at the same time tomorrow from cubical... 4am-6pm long shifts

TOP after opening camera (with edited "highlights") second TOP from video running (thru adb)

User 32%, System 6%, IOW 0%, IRQ 1%
User 102 + Nice 0 + Sys 21 + Idle 187 + IOW 0 + IRQ 4 + SIRQ 0 = 314

PID CPU% S #THR VSS RSS PCY UID Name
3512 35% S 24 56804K 19036K fg media /system/bin/mediaserver (started after i started the camera)

565 0% S 1 0K 0K fg root hid_compat (maybe bluetooth keyboards?)

630 0% S 1 0K 0K fg root pvrflip/0 (?)

1007 0% S 1 0K 0K fg root pvr_workqueue (?)

4222 0% S 1 0K 0K fg root sdio_wq (SD in-put/out-put)
4224 0% S 1 0K 0K fg root tiwlan_wq (lan)

4859 0% S 7 128140K 22484K fg app_18 com.android.camera
4880 0% S 1 0K 0K fg root OMAPVOUT-DSS (helps with display and X?)

[cideas]

Great find.. but wouldn't you need modifications to the USB controller to allow both SD mounting and sharing of the camera over the same bus? I'm not to savvy on hardware specs but arnt the two protocols different I would think so since you can't access the webcam storage ...

[Mateles]

Do you think your solution is going to require the phone to be rooted? Or are you hoping to write an app that doesn't require it?

[bb-gun]

If there was a way to get this, would it be good quality or will it be bad?
I know the ustream apparently has bad quality

[r-dubya]

I would guess that for the app to have full functionality over the aspects that it needs, that it would have to be rooted... Of course, I'm no dev, just taking a swing in the dark here...

[christim]

If there was a way to get this, would it be good quality or will it be bad?
I know the ustream apparently has bad quality

The phone takes good videos. No app exists for this yet so it would be an unknown right now. I'd guess if the bandwidth was there it would be good. It would be nice to have settings for quality so you could bump it up or down depending on how it was displaying...or maybe that would up to the viewer and not the sender?

[sam5828]

If there was a way to get this, would it be good quality or will it be bad?
I know the ustream apparently has bad quality

The phone takes good videos. No app exists for this yet so it would be an unknown right now. I'd guess if the bandwidth was there it would be good. It would be nice to have settings for quality so you could bump it up or down depending on how it was displaying...or maybe that would up to the viewer and not the sender?

there ia a app called usb webcam in the market works great

[natyc707]

How can I use my droid as a web cam ?

[gavron]

How can I use my droid as a web cam ?

Read the previous post.

[natyc707]

I Don't know how to use that app usb one