//FREE\\ Download Xsplit Connect Webcam
Galina Thurby
XSplit Connect: Webcam is a software solution that allows you to turn your Android phone into a high quality webcam. You will be able to make high quality video calls on the phone using this app, even with other smartphones.
4. Click Broadcast in the left corner the select Set Up a New Output. To set up a new output means to connect your streaming platform like Twitch or YouTube. You can set up multiple accounts for multiple streaming platforms.
Be it for work or school, video communications are skyrocketing. You are probably already using the webcam built into your laptop, or you've upgraded to a USB webcam. But today, we will tell you how you can up your teleconferencing game using your far superior smartphone camera.
Even a mid-range or budget smartphone from a few years ago likely has better camera hardware than a decent USB webcam. Android lacks native support for acting as a webcam for your PC, but that doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means we need to resort to third-party software to do the job.
We also did our due diligence to test the video quality of each of the solutions and will be including some observations on the subject, including detail, compression, smoothness, and connection stability. We will also throw in a laptop webcam for reference at the end.
Iriun has one of the most popular webcam apps around, as per the ranking in the Google Play Store. Starting with the phone app, you only get very few options laid-out in a convenient and orderly manner. It is simple and straightforward as it should be. There are no ads whatsoever, which is greatly appreciated.
Like most of the software solutions on the list, Iriun requires an app on your phone, as well as a PC client. While this does add an extra setup step, it is ultimately a good thing since these companion apps allow any teleconferencing app to pick-up your phone as if it were any generic USB webcam. The driver also generally enables a more stable connection, with less lag and delay than using approaches like MJPEG or RTSP.
You can get an even more stable connection if you forego Wi-Fi and use a USB connection instead. This functionality is not advertised enough in our opinion as it works great. Disconnecting the phone from Wi-Fi or USB is not a major deal either, since Iriun is very efficient at restoring the connection automatically.
One of the reasons Iriun is so popular is the ability to crank the video quality all the way up to 4K on the free tier. Better still, increasing resolution doesn't really hurt latency too much. You get around 1 second of delay at 4K on a strong Wi-Fi connection, and that drops to just about 1/2 second at the lowest 360p setting. You can see how these compare in terms of quality in the screenshots below.
Latency on your webcam app can actually be a major deal depending on whether your solution of choice can capture and stream the phone's microphone or not and whether you decide to do that or use a separate mic. Iriun is one of the few apps that can stream audio with video, and since both have the same delay, they will be in sync. However, we would actually advise against using Iriun for audio, since the quality is often bad and there is a lot of crackling and distortion. The video delay is low enough so you can grab a separate mic or use the built-on built in your laptop.
The app only has a single interface screen, but in a slightly different way than Iriun. Only a few options are left on the app UI, with all of them also accessible through the Windows app, which is a nifty idea since it allows you to just connect the phone and not touch it afterwards.
Resolution settings are accessed through the Windows app and you also get an FPS toggle, which can go all the way up to 4K@60fps, if your phone and DSP can support that. We really don't know why you would want anything beyond 30fps on a webcam, but the option is there.
You should probably avoid higher framerates, unless you really need them, though, since iVCam has notably higher latency, ranging from sub 1 second at 720p and below to over 2 seconds at 4K. Interestingly enough, switching over to a USB connection doesn't improve latency.
Just like with Iriun, the USB connection mode is not really advertised too much in iVCam. Another thing iVCam devs seem to have skipped on is connection recovery. Despite our best efforts, upon losing either Wi-Fi or USB connection to the phone, iVCam never could restore the connection automatically, always requiring some manual intervention.
There is also a quality slider in settings, which did not seem to affect the actual quality that much. Still, we took all the sample screenshots at the maximum quality setting. Also, it is worth noting that iVCam has an official guide on how to run multiple client instances on your PC and connect many smartphones to one PC, in case you need that functionality.
XSplit is a very popular name in the streaming space. Its toolkit includes a smartphone webcam app, but surprisingly that one is not nearly as popular as Iriun or iVCam. A lot of that might actually be down to the lack of 4K support. As far as we managed to determine, XSplit just works at 720p as a whole. Even purchasing the paid version does not increase resolution. All it does is remove the watermark, with all other features already available free. The watermark itself is quite obtrusive, just like iVCam's which is potentially motivation enough to spend the money.
On the plus side, Xsplit earns back quite a few points for its advanced encoder and connection settings. If for any reason, your current network setup misbehaves with one particular setup, you should be able to tweak it. Failing that, USB connection is supported and works just as well as Wi-Fi. Xsplit also does a great job of recovering from connection loss, just like Iriun.
Regardless of what connection you use, Xsplit has an impressively low lag. Probably the lowest of the bunch, going by observation, since we can't reliably measure it. Too bad then that it can't stream the phone's microphone at all. Still, having low lag is appreciated since it's less likely to appear out of sync with whatever microphone you do end up using.
Plenty of adjustments are available for the background effect and media. One particularly interesting thing we noticed is that the Xsplit application lists any device on the system that claims to be a webcam. Meaning that you could potentially use one of the other apps to deliver the feed to the PC, if you prefer its options and behavior and then use Xsplit for its background effects alone. However, this does not remove the watermark. You still have to get the paid version for that.
DroidCam is one of the oldest solutions for using your phone as a webcam. A fact you can definitely guess by the old-school UI. We won't really hold that against it, though. Plus, it has no ads at all.
Connection-wise, DroidCam can do both Wi-Fi and USB connection, and both are very prominently and clearly advertised, which we appreciate. Latency is very low when using both USB and a good Wi-Fi connection.
Microphone capture and stream is particularly well-done on DroidCam. Not only can you do it, with surprisingly good quality and low latency, but you can also choose to grab audio from a connected Bluetooth device. All in the free version, no less. If you really have no access to any other microphone, the audio capabilities of DroidCam alone might be a really compelling reason to go for it.
This is actually a good lesson that DroidCam taught us, effectively guiding the rest of our app selection for this list. Simply put - a web-technology-based webcam solution using things like MJPEG, RTSP, Onvif etc. are easier to implement, since they don't require a PC client. Hence, a lot more of these apps exist for Android. However, without a Windows client app, you generally get a lot worse latency, often too bad to even consider for anything other than security cam purposes. Plus, with no Windows client you have to figure out a way to inject the stream into your video chat app on your own. It can be done, but it's finicky and definitely worse than using a virtual device driver solution, as provided by the developer.
We won't be digging too much into IP Webcam for the purposes of using it as a webcam software. The primary reason being that it is meant to use technology like RTSP, MJPEG and Onvif to stream the camera video out of your smartphone. This is very convenient for certain use cases, especially those that do not require real-time operation and are not too affected by lag, since high latency is kind of inherent to these technologies.
Overall, a pretty cool piece of software, but not really designed to cover the most common webcam needs of the average user. Plus, setting it up properly is a gargantuan task with a lot of pitfalls. Even so, if you think it's your particular cup of tea, here are some quality samples we grabbed at the highest possible 100 quality setting.
For reference, here is the kind of quality you can expect from a decent and recent laptop webcam. This is from a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2019) - not neccesserily an outstanding performer, but still an HD cam fitted inside a high-end business-class notebook. So, overall, pretty representative of the kind of quality you can expect from a laptop webcam.
As one final step in our testing, we wanted to try and determine whether video input quality ultimately matters in a significant way when dealing with modern video call and conferencing tools. After all, if your software is going to compress or otherwise ruin the quality of the video anyway, why bother upgrading the webcam quality?
Since we needed a setup with as few variables as possible, we elected to pump this video through the video call on one end and then capture it on the other. OBS and its virtual webcam plugin were used to inject footage into the messengers at different quality settings. We made sure to switch both the input video's resolution, as well as the working and output resolution of OBS, and we tested at 4K, 1080p, 720p, 480p and 360p consecutively, while also making sure that the network connection was as good as possible and leaving enough time for the video protocol to adjust to the best possible resolution. Having a moving image instead of a stationary one was also crucial, just to keep the scenario more realistic.
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