And that without calling in twice. Laptop cameras as normally very crap. They say “1080p”, but most of the time they are 720p or less and have maybe 2 megapixels or less. Phones have way more and can be connected to the laptop via USB. There must be a way to use their camera over USB, right?
I know of USB over LAN, so surely this is possible.
Thanks to everybody. In the end I went with Scrcpy.
Recent Android phones support UVC, which is the same protocol used by webcams. Pixels for example support it.
My phone is kinda recent and has Android 18, but it didn’t work. Maybe future versions of Android will add it for all. That’d be cool!
^^^ this. And for older phones, if I remember correctly, I used something like this like 6 years ago: https://camo.com/camera. I’m afraid it’s not open source, but it looked trustworthy at that time, and I think it worked in Linux (as a standard webcam) but I might be mistaken. Take it with caution but from there you can start searching and maybe will find better alternatives.