You might be wondering why anyone would use their phone as a webcam. Well, that’s a normal kind of reaction, but there are plenty of good reasons to use a smartphone as a webcam. It is possible to use your old smartphone as a security camera in case you do not use it quite often. For example, you can use your phone to monitor what is going on at your home, use it to monitor baby, or use it as your PC webcam. In this tutorial, I will show you how to use your Android phone as a webcam for PC.
How to Turn Your Android Phone into a Webcam for PC
You can easily try to convert your Android phone into a webcam and do not have to buy a new standalone camera as well. In this article, I am going to share a step-by-step guide on how to use your Android phone as a webcam for PC. Let’s see that in detail below.
Steps to use an Android mobile phone as a Webcam
- First, you have to download the IP Webcam app via this link and install it on your Android mobile phone.
- After that download the IP Camera Adapter (by searching it on Google) and install it on your PC.
- Next, you have to open the IP Camera app installed on your Android phone.
- There will be many options like username, password, etc which you can adjust as per your choice. After doing this, click on the “Start Server” option.
- Note: This app uses the default rear camera for better quality. You can also change the camera mode to the front, but this will reduce the quality of your video.
- Now, after clicking on the start server, there will be an IP address displayed at the bottom of your Android screen. All you have to do is just open this IP in your PC’s Chrome or Firefox browser.
- For enabling the webcam view, you have to install the downloaded IP camera adapter on your PC.
- Go to the “Camera Stream URL” and enter the IP and port that you got from the app you installed on your Android phone and click on Autodetect.
- That’s it. You have now finished the setup, just open any video conferencing app on your PC like Skype or WhatsApp and you will be able to see the streaming video on your PC from your Android mobile phone.
How to use Android Camera as Webcam via USB
You can even try to use your Android as a webcam even without WiFi. All you need to do is enable USB debugging mode on your Android smartphone. Here are the steps.
- First, you have to turn on debugging mode on your Android device. So just go to Settings > Apps > Developer Options > and enable USB Debugging.
- Then, download and install DroidCam on your Android device by searching it on Google Play Store.
- After that, you need to connect your phone to your PC via USB and install the required drivers (you can also manually install the OEM drivers that can be found at this link).
- Then, download and install the Dev47apps client on your PC.
- Once the client is installed, select the “USB” icon just behind the WiFi in your Windows client, then click “Start”.
- That’s it. You will finally see your Android device’s camera on your PC, and you can also use it as a webcam.
That is everything you need to know about how to use your Android phone as a webcam on PC. While you are here, you might be also interested to know about How to Get Out of a Group Text on Android, and How to Use Wallpaper Engine on Android.