How to Use an Android Device as a Windows Camera

How to use an Android Phone as a Windows webcam: Most feature phones and all smartphones these days have a camera of one type or another. Some smartphones have low-resolution cameras with 2 or 3 megapixels resolution, others have HD cameras with 8 megapixels resolution and larger.Some smartphones now come with two cameras – one in the background for taking photos or videos, and one in the front for video chat or video calls. If you have an Android smartphone with a quality camera, why spend money on buying a webcam?

How to Use an Android Device as a Windows Camera

While some manufacturers offer this functionality built into smartphones, for other Android smartphone models you have to rely on the DroidCam software. This software connects your camera to Android as a virtual webcam on your Windows PC. As you can imagine, for this to work you need to install a program on the Windows PC as well as an app on the Android phone.

How to use Android Smartphone as Windows webcam

Apart from that, the basic requirement is that both your Android smartphone and Windows PC are connected to the same wireless (WiFi) network. You can easily do this by connecting both Android phone and Windows PC to the same WiFi router.

First of all You need to install the DroidCam app on an Android smartphone It’s a very small app, downloads in a fraction of a second and starts the server as soon as it launches. Then you need to note down the server IP and port number to use it on your Windows PC.

In the DroidCam app settings, you can change the options to keep the phone awake so as not to lose the camera, use the front camera instead of the rear camera, auto-dimming screen, etc. Use the front camera instead.

The next step involves downloading  DroidCam client for Windows from the developer’s website and installing it. During installation the virtual webcam drivers are installed on your Windows system. After the installation is finished, you can launch the DroidCam client from the Start Menu shortcut.You can choose how your smartphone connects to the PC network, either via WiFi or via USB. You need to enter the IP address and port number you noted from the Android DroidCam app, select video or/and audio, choose video quality and finally press the  Start button.

Right now you will instantly see a preview of the video captured from your Android phone’s camera. There are some controls at the bottom of the DroidCam client that can control brightness, rotation, zoom factor, etc. There are some controls at the bottom of the DroidCam client that can control brightness, rotation, zoom factor, etc., but all of these are only available in the paid pro version.

Since you have a webcam running on your Windows PC, you can start using it in any application or website. When choosing for the webcam, you will need to select DroidCam as the webcam (if you only have one webcam on your system, then it won’t be a problem).

Conclusion

You can easily use the Android smartphone camera as a webcam on your Windows PC. For this you can use DroidCam software on Windows and the free DroidCam app for Android. This creates a virtual webcam on Windows that receives the video and audio stream from the Android smartphone.