Friends Cam

Friends Cam pairs an Android app with a bundled Python backend and our own DirectShow driver, so your phone shows up in Windows as a real camera device. Zoom, Discord, Teams and OBS see it as ordinary hardware. 4K HEVC with hardware decoding, full manual camera control, MP4 recording with passthrough, snapshots and time-lapse. No cloud, no account, no subscription, no watermark.

We kept buying webcams for a room full of people already carrying far better sensors in their pockets. Every existing tool was either subscription-walled, watermarked, or shipped video through somebody else's server. So we wrote the boring version: phone talks straight to the PC over a documented TCP protocol, and left it open under MIT.

01

Phone sensors beat almost every built-in laptop webcam, and you already own one.

02

Video never leaves your LAN - direct TCP on port 8899, or fully offline over USB via adb forward.

03

Ships its own virtual camera driver, so it registers as a real capture device instead of a browser-only stream.

04

HEVC hardware encode on the phone, GPU decode on the PC, MP4 recording with passthrough so nothing is re-encoded.

05

Manual control the vendor camera app hides: ISO, shutter, focus distance, white balance, AE/AF lock, zoom with lens switching.

06

Connect several phones at once - each gets its own tab, its own recording, and its own webcam device.

07

MIT licensed, and the whole wire protocol is documented in PROTOCOL.md.