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ipwebcam-gst
============
This is a very simple shell script which allows Android users to use their phones as a webcam/microphone in Linux. The setup is slightly contrived, though:
* [IP Webcam](https://market.android.com/details?id=com.pas.webcam) (on the phone) serves up a MJPEG live video stream and a WAV live audio stream through HTTP (port 8080 by default).
* Port 8080 in the phone is bridged to port 8080 in the computer that the phone is plugged to, using ADB port forwarding. You can use IP Webcam through Wi-Fi, but it's rather choppy, so I wouldn't recommend it.
* From local port 8080, a GStreamer graph takes the MJPEG live video stream and dumps it to a loopback V4L2 device, using [v4l2loopback](https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback). The audio stream is dumped to a PulseAudio null sink.
* Most videochat software in Linux is compatible with `v4l2loopback`: Skype 2.1 (*not* 2.2, it seems), Cheese, Empathy and the Google Talk video chat plugin should work.
* The sound recording device for your videochat application should be changed to the 'Monitor of Null Sink' using `pavucontrol`.
This project includes `prepare-videochat.sh`, which does all these things, except for switching the recording device for your videochat application. It does open `pavucontrol` if needed, though. The script installs the GStreamer tools and `pavucontrol` if required, but you will have to install the [Android SDK](http://developer.android.com/sdk) and v4l2loopback by yourself.
To use this script, simply run it with `./prepare-videochat.sh` and follow instructions. You may have to customize a few variables in the CUSTOMIZATION section before using it, though.
Disclaimer: the script has only been tested in my local installation of Ubuntu 11.04. I can't really support other distributions, sorry!
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