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by jimmies 2143 days ago
Nice work!

I have been researching and working on this webcam quality problem for a while. I have tried a couple of webcam-over-phone solutions and while they solved the image quality issue, they tend to introduced quite some lag. Especially when you use your dedicated microphone, then the lag becomes a huge issue (because the microphone has minimal lag and the webcam has a significant lag leading to the voice not matching the lips).

Have you thought of the issue and have you done an analysis on that?

Besides, with this setup, you have to rely on a driver that turns the video from whatever phone to a webcam. That in my experience is quite flaky, but perhaps not inherently problematic. So I wonder if you could comment on OS support for people who want to use your software with say, Linux?

Disclaimer: I use and package a software suite to turn a raspberry pi high quality camera to a webcam. The lag seems pretty good and it appears as just a good old usb webcam on linux and windows (although I haven’t managed to make it work on macOS) [1].

1: https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam
2 comments
microcolonel 2143 days ago
I wonder how hard it would be to get a MIPI capture device that presents v4l2, I guess it's almost certainly more expensive right now than a Pi Zero.

Anyone know of a SDI or MIPI capture card that works off the shelf with v4l2?

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jimmies 2143 days ago
I haven’t tried looking for it and it seems like minimizing latency on the pi 0 is more fruitful and flexible than trusting such an adapter to work. And as you said, cheaper.
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soonpls 2143 days ago
thanks, jimmies! we do not have a dedicated microphone feature at the moment, and we did encounter a small amount of lag, but it varies based on device model. we hope it won't be an issue for our users. regarding the setup, we're aware of the driver dependencies, we're planning to build a complete Mac app instead of the plugin we have now, and to add Windows support soon as well. about Linux, it's not supported at this point but on the long-term, we want to have compatibility with all operating systems.
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