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Webcams aren't good enough

reincubate.com

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Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#31

Post by nawgz »

feet wrote: post #19
navanchauhan wrote: post #12

You can use you phone's camera as a webcam with Reincubate's Camo App. This required a wired connection iirc. You can also use OBS Studio along with a virtual camera plugin to use any device which can output directly to your computer. But most of these solutions do not work on Safari or FaceTime unless you manually modify the app. Now, Apple is going to soon introduce their "It Just Works" solution with the next rele…

Great, because I never want to use my phone while in a meeting What the actual fuck are they thinking just use a decent cam in the laptop But yea, mic audio is always trash too

Better to use the browser anyways, your eyes don’t divert from the screen this way. Much more subtle

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#32

Post by josefrichter »

I did quite a lot of research to find a camera with decent picture quality in low light conditions. I do multiple work calls almost every evening. I ended up buying also a key light and a microphone. I think in this age of remote work, it’s the right thing to do for your colleagues to invest in this equipment. It’s kinda annoying when 20 people on the call cannot hear your or see you properly.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#33

Post by birdyrooster »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #29

This made me laugh. > Using an iPhone as a webcam is easily the best option without dropping an excess of $1,000 for professional camera gear. Using the iPhone you already own, or a recent hand-me-down, a moderate investment in lighting, and Reincubate Camo, you can get excellent results and none of the frustration and hassle that accompanies standalone webcams. I don't have an iPhone. So if I want to buy one that is…

OBS camera won’t work in many MacOS programs nor will GoPro Webcam. It should be noted that the M1 MacBook Pro has a camera which is noticeably better than it used to be.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#34

Post by pintxo »

nextos wrote: post #27
pintxo wrote: post #15

As I had a Canon DSLR lying around during Covid, I have repurposed it to a webcam using Canons webcam driver: https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/se... Image quality is top notch and the ability to Zoom in/out using the zoom lense is nice. You also get some nice background blur, depending on your used lens. For power there are modified "batteries" allowing to plug the camera into AC for power.

Would it not overheat after some time?

I have had no heating problems whatsoever. Mostly its been in use for 1-2 hour sessions at a time, occasionally longer. I do turn the camera off in between though, so it's not turned on 24/7.

Most annoying is a bug in the Canon webcam driver, if the camera is switched off, it displays a static image, which somehow fully occupies a single core on my machine. I would have thought encoding a still image into a video stream should be doable with less cpu cycles.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#35

Post by andai »

I can't find it but I distinctly remember a HN post a few (1-2?) years ago, a blog post rant about how webcams are so bad relative to phone cameras.

I think the guy wanted to do a kickstarter to disrupt the industry (and 90% of the HN comments were telling him he would fail).

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#36

Post by kyriakos »

lucb1e wrote: post #14
retrac wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing As a hard of hearing person, the main reason I'd bother to video conference is so I can see a person's lips to understand them better. The vast majority of practical set-ups do not presently make that possible. Some are so bad with the compression and framerate that sign language gets substantially garbled, too.

You probably know of this already, but in some software you can have speech to text live subtitles. I hate to advertise for Google but their Meet thing is the only one where I know this exists. The quality is slightly worse than their YouTube auto-subtitles (and even those are worse than my own hearing as a non-native listener), though perhaps that's because the input is also worse and it needs to be realtime? Not su…

Microsoft Teams has live transcription feature too unfortunately if you don't speak in a native or near native US or UK English accent the results are quite bad.

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#37

Post by nicky0 »

nextos wrote: post #27
pintxo wrote: post #15

As I had a Canon DSLR lying around during Covid, I have repurposed it to a webcam using Canons webcam driver: https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/se... Image quality is top notch and the ability to Zoom in/out using the zoom lense is nice. You also get some nice background blur, depending on your used lens. For power there are modified "batteries" allowing to plug the camera into AC for power.

Would it not overheat after some time?

Not in my experience. I'm curious why you would you expect it to overheat?

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#38

Post by drdec »

josefrichter wrote: post #32

I did quite a lot of research to find a camera with decent picture quality in low light conditions. I do multiple work calls almost every evening. I ended up buying also a key light and a microphone. I think in this age of remote work, it’s the right thing to do for your colleagues to invest in this equipment. It’s kinda annoying when 20 people on the call cannot hear your or see you properly.

Care to share the results of your research?

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#39

Post by TheRealPomax »

thecybernerd wrote: post #16

When will 4K HDR video conferencing or even 1080p SDR become the norm? 3 years out? 5 years?

On the consumer side: not until people can actually afford casually dedicating the bandwidth necessary to deal with multiple 4k streams. Because either you need a truly monumentally liberal internet plan for sending uncompressed 4k at a normal frame rate, or you need a hardware encoder (baked in to your motherboard or discrete graphics card, or as separate purchase) to make sure you can send compressed 4k. And that only covers the sending part, you need to also receive and have the hardware capable of smoothly rendering the 4k video stream you're receiving.

But more importantly, on the industry side: given that live TV broadcasts are still 1080p, the answer here is almost certainly "not until the broadcasting world decides live 4k by default is even remotely worth it."

Re: Webcams aren't good enough

#40

Post by IggleSniggle »

lucb1e wrote: post #14
retrac wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing As a hard of hearing person, the main reason I'd bother to video conference is so I can see a person's lips to understand them better. The vast majority of practical set-ups do not presently make that possible. Some are so bad with the compression and framerate that sign language gets substantially garbled, too.

You probably know of this already, but in some software you can have speech to text live subtitles. I hate to advertise for Google but their Meet thing is the only one where I know this exists. The quality is slightly worse than their YouTube auto-subtitles (and even those are worse than my own hearing as a non-native listener), though perhaps that's because the input is also worse and it needs to be realtime? Not su…

Microsoft Teams also does this.
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