Revolutionize Your Video Calls: Your iPhone as an Incredible Webcam with OBS.Camera

nowadays in some form or another almost everybody is using live streaming technology and webcams and those kind of things whether you are a teacher you are a zoom conference participant or you have a lot of work meetings but maybe you're also doing live streams on youtube twitch or similar platforms of something gameplay arts creation or anything like that now how can you improve the quality of set livestream so that you may stand out between those others that are just using their in-built camera of a macbook or something similar now one way of doing that would obviously be to buy a mirrorless camera a capture card a prime lens and all those things however that's quite expensive and a lot of work to get everything set up dialed in and plugged in as well so that's something that may not be for you but what about using your smartphone as your camera for your live stream or maybe using your smartphone as a secondary camera so that you can provide a different angle for example one where you have yourself sitting in front of the camera and another where the camera is filming from the top onto the desk when you are doing some form of art creation now that's what i want to talk to you about today because i found a application that i think is probably one of the best solutions for this specific use case of using the cameras on your iphone inside of obs as well as using it as a virtual webcam so that you can use it in zoom calls and similar applications now there are a lot of applications out there that do this or something similar however i have taken out a good chunk of my time to figure out which one might be the optimal solution and i even purchased a couple of them for full transparency the one that i am highlighting today actually is one that i got gifted by the developers also for the purpose of making this review or at least for me to test it out if it is the right solution in my opinion and honestly comparing it to other solutions that i have also seen whether they are free or i purchased them previously with my own money that did not change my thoughts about this application but this is hands down the best application that i have found for this application i even made a video previously about another application called ndihx camera and that one was really promising to deliver a wireless functionality of using your iphone camera on your mac however after numerous times of trying to reach out to the developers to bring a basic functionality which would be to actually be able to use all three of the camera lenses on the iphone back and i have never heard back from them on those topics i have not seen development move forward now on the other hand with obs camera the app that i am showcasing in this video or reviewing here and showing you how you can set it up that's a different story you have loads of functionality loads of settings that you can choose to change yourself or let yourself be guided by certain presets but at the end of the day this is a high quality application that lets you change a lot of settings and provides you with two variations of connecting it to your computer for live streaming purposes and such things now before jumping into the setup process of how you can actually use this application to basically use it as a webcam but also two different ways of how you can actually use this in obs one is a wired usb cable solution and the other one is a solution where you are utilizing the wireless network that you have in your home with ndi integrated so those are two or actually three different kinds of solutions for this application which makes it very versatile but first let's give you a feature rundown of what this actually can do and also a little bit of an interface showing now first up as i've mentioned the application that i am talking about today is called obs camera you will find that at obs dot camera or in the links down below now this application is a application which is purely for the purpose of streaming your cameras to your computer in a way that is understandable by obs as well as other applications there are two different ways that you can do this which makes this really useful one of the ways is via a usb cable and the second is via nutex ndi technology which you can use wirelessly when using this with your iphone now there are tons of settings here and that's something that i want to 100 highlight because this is something that i have not seen to this granularity in other applications for one you get to change and choose the cameras so if i turn this sideways here and then i go to cameras there we have the ultra camera the triple camera dual camera telephoto and wide angle lens and the cool thing there is that if you choose triple camera for example then you have the zoom setting and you can go all the way from the ultra wide down to the really zoomed in picture now obviously that's not something that you really want to be using because this is now actually also a digital zoom but with those jumps between the 1x or rather 0.5 and then the 2 and so on it actually switches between the lenses which i think is a game changer for this type of setup because this is something i have not seen in any other camera application for this purpose and to be able to do that is really a big deal but of course you can also choose one specific camera lens so in this case i have selected the ultra wide lens and now when you are selecting a specific lens you actually get loads more settings for the purpose of dialing in your basic settings like iso shutter speed and so on and so forth so that's something that i think is key to this application however there's more because you actually also get all these different things which help you navigate the interface better or know better about your basic settings like for example you have a histogram you have highlights zebra shadows zebras as well as focus speaking and that all is right here built into that application and of course you can also change the capture quality you can choose between high standard and low and you can look into the documentation what those actually mean but you can also go into the custom settings and for example for me i have set it up at 1080p and with a frame rate of 30 frames per second because that is what usual live streaming situations want and of course youtube kind of forces you to use that setting however you can also go into those settings and for example go all the way to a full 4k live stream however keep in mind that data transfer between your phone and your computer still has to happen and there of course you will most notably find a lag the higher the resolution the more data you will have to transfer but i have made a couple of tests between the usb and the ndi connection with a kind of like a millisecond counter on the computer to see how fast the transfer is actually going and that's something i'm going to include at the end of this video now what are a couple of more interesting features of this application and one of the key ones in my opinion is that you are not only transferring your video signal but you're actually also transferring the audio signal from your phone to your computer so you can use the iphone microphone and you will also transfer that to your computer and that way you don't have any synchronization issues between audio and video this is a different story if you for example choose to use this as your camera in one of those connection modes and then you have a different setup for your microphone let's say you have a go xlr or something similar and then you would actually have to synchronize that signal later on in your streaming software i have made a video about that how you can actually use video delay for this purpose however it can be a bit tricky to kind of like get everything dialed in on that end and it might just be easier to simply use the audio coming from your phone and of course you can still if you're not using the usb connection use your lightning port to also connect a microphone to your phone so that you have better audio better cameras and all that combined now what are the main drawbacks of using a smartphone as your camera in your live stream and i would say the biggest one is probably latency because by capturing the video on your phone and then transferring with software solutions to your computer you are inevitably going to introduce some kind of lag between the two or latency in this case i have measured them and they are in the realm of a quarter of a second sometimes it's half a second or so that might not be an issue or as bad as you might think however it is definitely more than for example using a camera and then an hdmi capture card to set all of this up this application has a latency you won't get around that you can minimize it by using the usb wired connection however of course then you are going to lose the wireless capabilities and the ability to just use this as you are walking around in your home for example the other two drawbacks that i have here aren't necessarily really drawbacks one is that you might need to do some tinkering and synchronization work if you want to use a different microphone solution compared to this as your camera you might have to do some work to line things up there with render delays and such things however the other one is of course the cost and one could say this is a drawback others might say this is actually a benefit this application the obs camera application costs around 16 us dollars of course as you know in different countries that price may vary slightly based on the taxes in any given country however in the us it's around 16 us dollars that of course is cheap comparing it to a high-end mirrorless camera with capture card prime lens and all of that so this might actually be just a good solution for you that works wonders now before jumping into the setup process of obs camera as well as the comparison between those different modes i want to highlight that if you start looking into the application a little more you might find links to a different application by the same people which is called taylorstream.camera now i asked the creators of what the actual difference between the two is and they said that the taylorstream.camera is more focused on providing a webcam signal and it at the moment does not support audio transmission on the other hand obs dot camera does support audio transmission and also has the two different ways of usb and ndi support and that is basically the core difference between these two applications personally i can say that i would basically just go for the obs dot camera as of the recording of this video because it is the more feature-rich variation of the two and at the end of the day you actually can do pretty much all the things that you can do with telestream camera also with the obs dot camera and we'll see how you can actually achieve those things in the coming sections so now let's jump into the setup process and what benefits you might have in the different setup processes of course first up before we even start you will need the application on your phone and of course you can get that from the website or the app store so this is the website of the creators of obs dot camera you can find that at obs dot camera as well as with the link in the description down below and there you can find the link to the download on the mac or apple app store for iphone of course they say here it's compatible with ios hardware released 2016 and later so that is a good chunk of phones that is compatible with this and of course as i've mentioned before you have all kinds of different controls and features here and that's what you will find here now this is the interesting section you have multiple ways of connecting to obs you have a usb as well as a wi-fi connection with the new tech ndi way and the first one i want to look into is the usb connection because that is the way that has the lowest possible latency and also a very stable connection now before we jump into that specific setup process you also need obs studio which should be kind of obvious because that's the application that we want to use this with at the end i will also show you one way of how you can actually use this with the obs camera without obs studio and using that signal in skype or also zoom or similar applications but for now also having obs studio is definitely worth the try because only in obs studio you will be able to use the usb connection mode now to set this up you of course download obs studio and then you install it like any other application i'm not going to go into detail about that however if you then want to install the way that the usb connection works with obs camera you will have to go to the getting started with obs studio ios camera plug-in this is basically the usb connection mode the ios camera plug-in and there you will download either the windows or the mac os plugin for obs and install that as well as you can see down here maybe as a windows user you might have to take care of a couple of aspects about that but now as you have those applications installed restart obs or ideally have stopped obs or quit obs before installing this plug-in then you can start obs and in obs you can create a new scene and then hit that plus icon and with that plugin installed you should see something that is called ios camera right at the bottom of the add new source screen with that you're asked to name your source i'm just going to call it ios camera and with that it's time to take that lightning cable plug that into the iphone unlock my phone start the application obs camera go onto the gear icon at the lower right hand corner and up at the top you can choose between capture output and help and inside of output we want to go on to usb because of course we want to use the usb connection and down at the bottom you will see a couple of different additional settings which is called usb encoding settings and there you can choose the highest bit rate or the highest highest possible bit rate and then also how many key frames you want to send now the interesting thing about these settings is that they decide how the compression is going to work on the way through the cable basically and if you want to have a very low latency connection it is actually possible to choose the highest one at the top right there which means that the data is less compressed however then of course there's more data that is transferred over the wire basically and so you can choose between different settings there i have chosen the 60 000 kilobits and then with a keyframe setting it says that you might want to try to use the every frame setting if you're using a older device because then the device has to do less work in terms of compressing the video signal however on newer iphones this should not give you any problems but if you are experiencing any you can play around with these settings and there's also information in the setup guide and the website help manual and those things to basically know more about this i find it really helpful that they have really nicely described what kind of settings are available there and how they are basically used for your purposes and how you might want to change them if you are experiencing certain issues so now i have the cord plugged in now the other end goes into my computer and with that i'm now going down out of the settings with the done button i have the camera application ready and with that in the properties for the ios camera i can go in and select something however there's nothing to select but i can change that by hitting the refresh device and now since i plugged this in the device is actually here on the list and as you can see now i actually have this already going right there of course latency i would always choose the low latency because we want to have as little latency as possible and then i also want to enable the hardware decoder so that more of the work can be done by hardware aka the graphics card so now i can hit ok there and i have the standard issue that i don't really like which is that the transmission is in vertical form or no it's portrait mode so now i can go on to this right-click transform and go on to the fit to screen or fit to frame now that we have this in full size i can also just turn this over and as you can see now i have the obs camera from my phone connected to my computer and this is how it works and the fascinating thing is that i think that the latency is actually really stunning in terms of how little latency there is now i did a couple of tests there with a millisecond clock on the screen filming that streaming it back taking a screenshot and i measured it between 166 milliseconds and 250 milliseconds for this usb connection version and that actually i think is really really quick now looking onto the screen recording in obs you will also notice that there is actually audio coming called ios camera and that i think is actually really cool that you have the audio that is coming from your phone and that is streamed to your desktop computer here so that's really really powerful and it is one way of how you can connect this with your computer now of course the computer has a lot of work to do there and i am hearing the fans pretty noticeably that is not the case if i don't use this type of connection however it is something that is really normal for the use of obs because the work to compress and work like just render all the video and stuff live in real time is a good chunk of work so that is to be expected now again this is one way of connecting this what about the wireless way with the wireless new tech or ndi interface and for that they have a different help file here with the wi-fi via new tech ndi and with that you will notice that you have a couple more things to download and to install now i have made videos about ndi and obs previously and i think that the setup process could be a little bit easier however let's just go over it for a second first up they are describing this here and i will link this help article in the description below that you will need the github repository obs ndi and go to releases so we are now on that ndi repository and as you can see now we have the newest version and it's always good to install the newest version so that you have the latest and greatest stuff that is going on there maybe there are some patches maybe there is some work done in terms of performance so that's always a good idea and with this here you will actually need the obs ndi 4.90 for mac os at least that's the version that is available as i am recording this and then you will also need to go down here because for mac os you will actually also need the ndi runtime and there the order doesn't necessarily matter all that much you can install the obs ndi plugin first or you can install the runtime first but you need both you definitely need the obs ndi490 or newer mac os package and then also the ndi runtime because otherwise this whole thing will not work the way that it should be so with those two installed on your system then we have ndi available inside of obs when we hit that add new source and go to ndi source so hitting that i just say okay that's going like that and with that i can now unplug my phone because we are not going to need a connection via the wire anymore and inside of the application on the phone the obs camera we go to the gear icon go to output and there we can choose ndi or new tech ndi and that is everything that this technology needs it is really mind-blowing how simple that is because now we are already ready and we have this ndi source open on the screen we have the obs camera application open right there and now if i go and click that drop down here i again don't see anything however that's once more because i have started the ndi source on the phone once this window was already open so you might just have to reopen that by closing it and then double clicking on that and now i have these sources and as you can see i have my source of this phone i can say i want to have the highest bandwidth source timing of course hardware acceleration and in terms of latency the low or experimental mode hit ok and with that now we have this available and once more i'm going to transform this and set it to fit to screen i will make the other one invisible so we are not distracted by that now this once more i can turn this over and it immediately turns over as well fitting into that screen and as you can see now i have the ultra wide lens ready to rock right there and as you can also see on the screen recording we are having audio which is coming from the phone right here and with that i now actually could take my phone walk around the house do other things have this set up as a top-down camera for example for my desk or similar things the options are pretty much endless and the cool thing about this is that actually i measured a really low latency there as well especially with the low in brackets the experimental mode i actually measured a latency between 184 and 235 milliseconds so that's basically as fast sometimes if not faster than the usb connected mode and of course the phone gets really warm because it is doing a lot of work so it is definitely useful to not necessarily put this into a big housing maybe even take it out of your case and of course provide battery because streaming this information to your computer is a lot of work for the phone so don't just use this without a battery or at least know how your battery status is going if you don't have that much battery left your live stream might be cut short just because of that now what is the main difference between these two modes in terms of the usb connected mode and the new tech ndi mode the one is very obvious the usb connected mode is cable bound and the new tech and the eye version you have the ability to just take your phone walk around the house and do similar things if you want to use the cable bound that might be a bit more stable and of course not dependent on the load on your wi-fi network because the latency might also change based on how much data is transferred in your wireless network because of course that is used with the ndi solution now something really cool however is that the functionality of the application of course is the same whether you want to use audio in one way or the other it doesn't matter video and audio is transferred in both ways and of course you have the settings that you can do on your phone which is also super super helpful however there is a third way of how you can use this application with your computer and that is actually using this as a webcam now for starters if you are using obs for different purposes like adding a lower third or some type of effects and switch between different cameras and scenes of course you can just use the start virtual webcam or start virtual cam mode in obs which is now supported in windows as well as on mac os so that's really really cool however keep in mind that you might have a bit of a delay or some type of latency there because this whole processing takes a lot of compute power and i am actually noticing my phone becoming really really warm right now so that's something to keep in mind that the different latencies and delays might be an issue if you want to use this however there's another way of how you can actually use this camera the obs camera as a webcam inside of other applications and there you will need a tool that is included in the ndi tools which is a free application package basically which will give you different type of applications which are helpful for exactly this purpose and one of the tools or the tool that we are going to be looking at is ndi virtual input and that gives you the option that you can use the signal that is coming from your camera on your phone and use that in the new tech ndi mode and then the ndi virtual input will just simply take that signal turn it into a video signal or a webcam signal and also take the audio signal and provide you with a virtual microphone so to say so that you can use the audio from your iphone as a microphone inside of your zoom call for example now to set this up of course you first need the ndi virtual input and that you can download into or in this ndi tools package and of course you have the one for windows as well as the one for mac now you can download this however you will have to plug in a bit of data into this form now once you have that just open that package unzip it and then you have the ndi virtual input which you can install from there now once you have that application installed it is actually super super minimal now i have it right here the ndi virtual input and opening this up you can see you get a icon in your menu bar or in your dock however you just get that little bit of menu at the top right here and there are literally no settings there the only thing that you can do is you can choose the source and in my case i still have the camera open like this i can choose the source speed io iphone and that's it the application keeps running in the dock there's just no other preferences or settings however what we now can do is we can actually start zoom and having that open i can go into the preferences go into the video settings and right here i now have something that is called ndi video and i select that and you can see now i once again have the video signal from the obs camera which is now on the ultra wide lens so that's really really cool and once again the latency is relatively minimal now what about the audio of course that's also available if you go into the audio settings in zoom there you can say the speaker of course you would want to use some type of headphones to reduce the risk of having some kind of feedback loop and with the microphone you can also choose the ndi audio and with that you're actually using the audio from obs camera inside of zoom now that's a overview of the obs dot camera application on your iphone so that you can use your iphone cameras and actually use all of the different ones that you have available the front facing the back facing and also of course the different back facing ones available for you to use as a webcam inside of obs as well as as a webcam for your zoom calls skype calls or microsoft team meetings this actually is something where i think this application is the number one in the app store right now for the purpose of doing this even though it might not be as well known as some of the other brands on the market the developers are giving you a lot of choice in terms of the settings that you want to make as well as giving you a lot of choice about the camera and of course the shutter speed and also the brightness of your whole shot and those things it basically is a manual grade camera app which has the automatic features but you also can set everything manual half the zebras and also of course focus peaking and all of that i am really blown away as to how much work they have put into this how much functionality and having the usb and the ndi solution for connectivity is really a game changer now with all that said i hope this was a helpful video for you in terms of setting up your iphone as a webcam i know this application is not free in the app store but i think for what you're getting the 16 us dollars is actually a good deal and using this phone or using a iphone as your main webcam can really change the game in terms of the possibilities that you have on your hands now if you have questions around this topic around this application the ndi solution or similar things you can leave those down in the comments below and i will try to answer you there or make a video specifically about that topic if you like this video or it was helpful please give this video a thumbs up that helps out a lot with youtube algorithm and of course it also helps me understand what type of videos you want to see more of with all of that said i hope you have an amazing day have fun streaming recording or whatever you do with this application and i will see you in the next video ciao

Channel: Chris Spiegl

Views: 48,106

Keywords: spieglio, Chris, Spiegl, How to use iPhone as Webcam, Better Webcam, OBS Camera, OBS Studio, Live Streaming with OBS, iPhone as Wireless Webcam, iPhone as USB Webcam, Smartphone Webcam, Improve Zoom Video Quality, NDI, NDI Wireless, iPhone NDI Source, Live Streaming with Wireless Camera

Id: oK0YbDI77Oo

Length: 32min 24sec (1944 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021