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by romanhn 1177 days ago
Sure thing. Here are the specific items I ended up with:

  - Cam link 4K card: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B09XXBTBYB
  - Dummy battery kit: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B078PDCF7D
  - Micro HDMI cable: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08C2QMT4R
In terms of camera settings, I think the main ones were switching the file format to XAVC and turning off the display icons so they don't show when I'm on video. Might be worth going through https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00245829 and trying a bunch of these, even though the page is not exactly for the same camera.

After that just plug it in and it's recognized as a USB camera. One other thing I ran into was the camera kept losing settings after being turned off. Turns out there is an internal battery that got discharged after years of non-use. I think I used a micro USB cable with a running camera to get it juiced up.

Good luck!
1 comments
preya2k 1177 days ago
Or save yourself the cost and latency of the HDMI grabber and use it via gphoto2/v4l2 if you don't mind a little command line action. https://girishjoshi.io/post/using-dslr-camera-as-webcam-on-l...
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danudey 1177 days ago
I tried this approach and the latency was through the roof, easily a second or so off, making it effectively useless for video conferencing. Switched to an HDMI grabber so I could get something that was actually realtime.
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preya2k 1175 days ago
You need to dial in the fps. It's a little bit of work to try different parameters and might not work for every camera. But with most cameras I was able to get the latency below 300ms which should work for most use cases.
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romanhn 1177 days ago
Not sure this would work with every camera. My particular model does not support remote shooting over USB. Newer models of the same camera do and Sony even provides software to go the USB route.
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preya2k 1175 days ago
The native Sony software will only support 720p resolution. So gphoto2 still offers better resolution.

"Shooting over USB" is not a requirement to use this. The camera only needs to be able to output the preview stream via USB, which works with most cameras.

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