Tech Story - Old Cellphones as wireless roaming webcams? Possible if "old" = almost new!

Our webcast experiments got me thinking about accessible webcasting cameras. "Real" video cameras are impossible or difficult to get to act as webcams. Conventional webcams are very limited.

Searching for answers leads me to this article:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-build-a-security-camera-network-out-of-old-smartphones/
Author Ryan Dube suggests using old cellphones as webcams.  For us, advantages could include a viewfinder for a roving camera operator and wireless connection to the base PC over wi-fi.  Productive use of old phones has philosophical appeal.

This led me to a long journey through many options. Hopefully with these notes I can save this time for someone else.

Best solution I found: Android App "IP Webcam" by Pavel Khlebovich.  Here is what you need to know so you can get there faster than I did!

App Info does not say what version of Android we need.  It only says "Varies with device".  I succeeded with an LG E400f with Android 2.3.6. I lost lots of time trying to get the Google "Play/Market" app providers  to work for older phones with Android 2.2 or 2.1 - only to then discover that "IP Webcam" was not available for them.

Note that while running,  "IP Webcam" has 2 versions of its network address and we need to choose the right one for what we want to do on the base PC.
In my case I see this version displayed on the phone:
http://192.168.1.103:8080
I enter this in a browser on the base PC and I find that the phone now has its own mini website with a monitor window and lots of controls and information.  Good quick test and possibly useful for security surveillance.
The alternative version looks like this:
http://192.168.1.103:8080/videofeed
I need to add suffix "/videofeed" to the basic address to setup my  PC "feed receiving" software.
In this "ManyCam" screenshot, the small thumbnails are video from the PC webcam and the cellphone.  The cellphone feed is switched to the main output screen.

In this "ManyCam" screenshot, the small thumbnails are video from the PC webcam and the cellphone.  The cellphone feed is switched to the main output screen.(click on image to enlarge)

"IP Camera Adapter" is a free download from
http://ip-webcam.appspot.com
"IP Camera Adapter" receives the "signal" from your IP Webcam Phone and translates it into  a "virtual webcam" which means it becomes available to apps like "Skype" .

Screenshot of an LG E400f cellphone with "IP Webcam" feeding video to Skype via "IP Camera Adapter".  The Adapter appears in Skype as option "MJPEG Camera". (click on image to enlarge)

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Other trials:  I have an old Windows 7 phone.  I found 2 apps for that.

"Cam Broadcaster" by Venetasoft, NZD 1.50,  comes with a downloadable PC "Venatasoft WP Console" app as part of the package.  It is monitor-only ie I could not find a "virtual webcam" capability.  I did find I could get remarkably good results by using "ManyCam" to "screen-scrape" the video from the console window.  My base PC has 2 screens which gives me enough space to leave the console window clear for such workaround trickery.

"PocketCam" by Senstic, NZD 7.00 (approx. USD 5.00) also comes with a custom download, Senstic  "PocketControl" receiver,  for the base PC.  I did achieve "virtual webcam" capability with my setup but at a slow frame rate of about 3 fps.  I prefer "Cam Broadcaster" because I can get a better result for what I want and I am OK with the workaround setup needed.

I recommend "IP Webcam" as a clear winner for most of you reading this.

For me it may be Venatasoft "Cam Broadcaster"  for the near future to go with my available phone.   A screen-scraped "Cam Broadcaster" lets me record or webcast in my preferred widescreen image format of 640 x 360.

To move to "IP Webcam", I need to go hunting in web auctions for a low cost Android phone with Android version 2.3.6 or above and widescreen video - which probably means 1280 x 720.

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Other notes.

A helpful discovery.
You do not need a SIM card.  All this will work just as well, or just as badly, treating the phone as a non-phone wifi camera gadget.  When I was having  app market/play/store problems one of my ideas was to borrow a SIM card and get the phone working as a phone to see if that would make any difference.  No. Makes no difference.


Security considerations
In my case, a phone in this role needs to be lent out to students and various volunteer film-making helpers.  It needs to be safe from accidental messing -up.  Unfortunately on going to remove the Google Account from an Android Phone I get dire warnings that this will erase everything. What I therefore do is run an organisational Google  Account for Android experimentation.  Then when I have the apps on the phone I shut down the phone - then I get into my PC regular internet browser, login to Google and change the password.  This effectively kills account operations on the phone.  The phone may do some complaining popup messages but just ignore it.



Comment on the Ideal of reuse of old phones.
Nice idea but in practice you need a reasonably new phone for this kind of experimentation else you get lost in the swamp of reduced support and interest for old phone apps.   I also ran into problems with older phones and the app provider systems - which have names like "Market", "MarketPlace", "Play" and "Store". eg  Android apps which fail to download and install with messages like " Error while retrieving information from server [RPC: S-7: AEC-0]".  I did Google searches on this and read a lot of forum advice which did not work for me - (eg  try setting up another account).  Choose your old unwanted phone carefully - not too old!

Tech Story - Live Webcasting Experience. Beware eccentric temperamental technology! Pre-record if you can!

I thought Webcasting a live forum would be a lightweight fun thing to do. That we feed straight to Youtube while live switching between cameras saving on the editing workload of our usual multi-camera shoot. No! No! No! It was all drama to get a setup of temperamental software and hardware to work together and amazing that they did hold together for one hour at the appointed time. I can now compare webcasting with our usual event-filming method which is filming in real time with 3 video cameras then edit the result before uploading to "Youtube".

• The webcast preparation workload is way more than the workload of post-editing. 
• The webcast is of lesser image and audio quality because of the limits of real-time uploading and processing. 

 For what we were doing, an indie mock talk show, we could get the same spontaneous live feeling by running uninterrupted with 3 cameras rolling, just like filming a concert. The live feeling would happen during recording maybe 2 days before it appears on "Youtube" which is totally good and OK.

So why even write a detailed article? Some of the tech observations and problem solving experiences do relate to other areas like webcasting for education and studio-style indie production. Our future selves, or other readers today, may have access to higher quality specialist systems like high speed internet connections combined with specialist high powered media servers.

In the meantime, if we absolutely must webcast then let us go into it with the idea that it is a medium which by its nature is not smooth and not clear - looking and sounding like early TV experiments of the 1930s and 1940s. That can have its own kind of artistic goodness, it is up to us to discover and use it in ways that work for what it is. ... which of course we did!

IN DETAIL (link to iafilm website)

"Brave Love" Post 03 - The Webcast Experience

Done! The webcast experience. I was a wreck by webcast time wrestling with the temperamental tech. Big big thanks to all involved for getting us through it. Special thanks to our guest Gerri Kimber for her insights into Katherine Mansfield and her work. For more on KM:
http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/

If I need to do anything like this again I will seriously consider a pre-recording session with conventional cameras and editing. Does this webcast have some magic added value of an "authentic live feeling"?  I am too close to it to answer this question so others need to tell me.

The link here is to "Version 02". Soundtrack upgrade from an audio recorder that I had running in the room. Some editing. Some sub-titles. New "proper" uploads of the video clips. New is a trial edit of Scene 21 with green screen processing applied. Appears at 43min 17sec or start at 41min to see it with another version of the same scene as I filmed it in 1981.

Some comfort to know that others find webcasting difficult:
http://www.zdnet.com/…/finding-a-camcorder-that-works-with…/
Writer David Gewirtz is clearly an expert but he had similar trouble - with only 1 of him and 1 camera. We had 5 of us present, plus 1 Skyped in, plus 1 phoned in, and 3 cameras on the case.

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Link to "Brave Love" Post 01

"Brave Love" Post 02 - "100 Years of Brave Love" - the webcast.

Webcast: 100 Years of Brave Love

On 12 Jan 1915, Katherine Mansfield wrote:

".. actually finished the story Brave Love today and I don't know what to think of it even now…"

On 12 Jan 2015, our indie film-making group takes time out from our production of "Brave Love" to mark this centenary with our guests.
20:30 NZDT Auckland.
07:30 GMT London.
13:00 India, New Delhi.
02:30 New York, USA East Coast.
23:30 on 11 Jan for USA West Coast.

The webcast looks and plays on Youtube like a conventional Youtube video.
It remains available afterwards as a replay.
Planned running time is 1 hour.

The webcast will be a gathering of cast and crew from the movie talking about KM and "Brave Love" and indie film-making. We plan some interviews in character. We plan to play some work-in-progress clips from the movie. We are hoping to recapture some of the spirit of the kind of creative gatherings where Katherine Mansfield and her "Bloomsbury Set" friends threw around ideas that sparked a major historical burst of creative achievement.  We are going for an entertaining time taking our cue from TV talk shows, with a touch of KM's satirical social comment and how it is still relevant today.

LATER. Achieved with some tech challenges. The link here is to a post-edited version with the delays edited out. Guest Gerri Kimber was excellent value. It is interesting to write this note in 2021 after doing a lot of webcasting as an educator through the COVID pandemic. Webcasting has come a long way since these pioneering days of 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXVszLEKAKc

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Link to "Brave Love" Post 01

Film Commission frowns on Kiwi Ingenuity? The sky is falling!

 On 24 Apr 2014, Dave Gibson, new head of the NZ Film Commission, was interviewed by Simon Morris on the RadioNZ programme "At The Movies".
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/atthemovies/20140424

Summary of some discussion starting at 06:43
"The things that concern me .." ... "the democratisation of film-making" is "a bit scary". Can be a good thing and a bad thing. People with no skills and no abilities will be able to make (feature) films. (Morris: "no gatekeeper?").  With bad poetry you can put the book down quickly.  With bad films you have "paid $20 and get stuck in a cinema for an hour and a half with a terrible film".

Regardless of material costs, it is a major social organisation challenge to get people together make a 90 min movie.  And those people are all quality control gatekeepers. The project leaders need ideas, passion, credibility to win them over. On completion, distributors and film festival selectors are severe quality control gatekeepers.  The situation Dave dreads could only happen where the film-makers hire a venue as a rare one-off.  Also the democratisation of film-making is not a future event. It started with Super-8mm about 1980.  I first trapped a paying audience in the dark for 90 min in Dec 1982 with "Breaking Out Of Pattern".  The sky did not fall. OK it did get a bad review in the "Auckland Star" newspaper... gatekeeper!

I am concerned that we are heading for a downturn rather than a no-budget explosion. Dave's "equipment revolution" is up against a world of more work-pressure and time-pressure making co-op and community projects more difficult.

This reminds me of Robert Greene.  Who?  Robert was a playwright complaining about the democratisation of live theatre.  He was especially upset about writers without university degrees.  They should not be allowed!  And the worst offender was - ta da! - that awful "upstart crow" William Shakespeare! The year was 1592.  We have survived democratisation since then.  So do we have a Film Commission ready to discourage the next emerging William Shakespeare?

Which brings us to the latest Film Commission initiative and their call for comments.

http://www.nzfilm.co.nz/news/lower-budget-features-and-escalator-review
http://www.script-to-screen.co.nz/2014/08/first-features-on-a-shoestring-discussing-escalator/

NZFC proposes ramping up their "Escalator" scheme of $250000 low budget movies. But they insist on full professionalism, so that means as my writer friend Colin Rock says: "2 actors and a puppet in the back of a garage".  This follows the success of Escalator film "Housebound", a horror movie with a small cast and a house.  Huge congratulations to everyone involved in "Housebound" for making a great little movie.  I wonder if this is in spite of "Escalator" rather than because of it?  Can anyone else see that small scope horror movies are the only kind of success we can have out of this?

In my opinion projects need to be "EITHER-OR". As in either co-op no-budget ($5000 to $50000 production) or fully professional with a good scope of film visual language ($2 million plus). Anywhere in-between is awkward and a bad idea.  Hey Film Commission you got lucky with "Housebound" but you are now drawing the wrong conclusion from that.
Quoting NZFC:  "..genuinely lower-budget in scope and methodology to be candidates for funding. This wouldn’t be about making a bigger budget film for less money or cutting corners at the expense of cast, crew and industry partners."
Is this a ban on Kiwi Ingenuity? Does this mean a ban on the use of number-8 wire?!  Does this mean a ban on deals like deferrals or part-payments mixed with percentage shares?
Yet elsewhere on their website, NZFC does write about doing shares.  Ref:
http://www.nzfilm.co.nz/training/guide-for-new-filmmakers/tips-advice/film-production
"..repay any deferrals key creatives have made..",  "..percentage each individual cast or crew member allocated points will get..".
Anyone else see a contradiction here?
Aside: This NZFC "Guide For New Filmmakers" needs a lot of improvement. Film-makers who do not get grants are still supporting NZFC as taxpayers through their day jobs. The NZFC could fulfil its purpose with respect to them by giving more and better quality advice. Useful details would help eg supplying example forms such as releases and agreements.


Let us now consider the example of no-budget feature "Bad Taste"(1987) by the emerging Peter Jackson. Article with Trailer at:
http://nofilmschool.com/2013/12/peter-jacksons-diy-approach-to-bad-taste-20-dollar-steadicams/
This does everything "wrong"!  This is totally about the forbidden love of " making a bigger budget film for less money ..".  In 1987 the NZ Film Commission came on board and funded post-production and marketing.  I wonder if today's Film Commission is capable of that kind of vision?

"Brave Love" post 01 - our indie feature length movie is in production

We are on the great indie adventure - living the dream - making our no-budget feature movie.

Shooting started 09 Oct 2013.  I have held back from public discussion until now when completion is looking good.  We have been taking on an ambitious mock epic. Time and time again we have faced impossible barriers then dramatically, ingeniously and heroically have rescued the production.  Or putting it another way, a normal indie no-budget collaborative experience!

Aimed initially at film festivals. Experimental in its extensive use of green screens to shoot most of the scenes in one borrowed classroom over our New Zealand(NZ) summer break.  Has "green screen" technology trickled down far enough that we can make it work for this? Let's do it to find out! [Later, Jan 2015, Yes! it is working.]

Working titles:

"Katherine Mansfield Retold: Brave Love"

"Brave Love"

"The Secret Desert of Your Mind"

IMO this story, written then lost 100 years ago, on rediscovery scores remarkable hits on issues that are relevant today. Katherine Mansfield (KM) is big on The Gap Between Rich and Poor. I also bring in the global warming debate as sparking conflict between the characters. This is mainly achieved by taking KM's banker villain and changing his occupation to oil company chief.

The script is my adaptation of classic literature into a present day setting. Inspired partly by the "Shakespeare Retold" TV Plays from the BBC a few years back. Includes material mainly from Katherine Mansfield (NZ, UK, Stories and notebooks, 91-107 years ago), also Jonathan Swift ("Gulliver's Travels", 300 years ago) and William Shakespeare (400 years ago). What emerges is a satirical big-business mock epic set in the imaginary oil boom city of Lagado, 300 years after its appearance in "Gulliver's Travels".

Why make a feature when it is so difficult?  Because it is so difficult?  Partly!  Also the democratisation of film-making is now giving us a flood of short films.  eg The Winterthur Short Film Festival recently had over 5000 entries chasing only 41 screening opportunities. Features need a big human organisational effort regardless of how accessible the tech gets, so there may yet be time to stand out from the smaller crowd going the feature way.  Also we have had some film festival successes with short films.  To us that means that growing and developing means taking on the monster challenge of the feature.

To creative enthusiasts in Auckland, NZ - we are now moving into "second unit" filming where we need supporting role actors and extras and more crew help.  We mostly hold day jobs and film at night so to all you enthusiasts with day jobs, here is your big opportunity.  For info, audition or interview, find me via

IMO most no-budget narrative movies are either 2-actor intense unusual-relationship dramas or horror-zombie-vampire attempts to repeat the breakthrough success of Peter Jackson in the late 1980s. Time for something different.  In The Guardian article "The Burning Question" - http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview29  Robert Macfarlane asks "where is the literature of climate change?"  OK so modern writers are not up to this challenge so let's bring in the power of classic literature - who you gonna call?  Katherine Mansfield!

TPPA Protest March - Auckland, NZ, Sat 28 March 2014

My placard photos below from the TPPA Protest March.  I found myself focussing on the placards as representative images.

My concerns come from following the "Electronic Frontier Foundation" website
http://www.eff.org
eg proposed copyright restrictions that could make it even more risky for emerging film-makers to include elements of criticism, review and current events commentary on popular culture in their movies.  

EFF TPPA page is here:
https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp

The EFF article has, based on the TPPA leaks, some positive comment on the NZ negotiators.

The United States Trade Representative (USTR) is putting fair use at risk with restrictive language in the TPP's IP chapter. US and Australia have proposed very restrictive text, while other countries such as Chile, New Zealand, and Malaysia, have proposed more flexible, user-friendly terms.

The secrecy of the negotiations mean that we cannot give NZ more than a small pat on the back for this.  It is therefore good to keep the pressure on NZ to push for fairness, public interest and open democratic discussion of the TPPA.  I would like to see more criticism of the Australian Government, our near neighbour which seems to act too much like an unquestioning follower of US policy.

Good to see us marching.  IMO increasing apathy in NZ so far this century so it is reassuring that people can get out in enough numbers to make a good show down Queen St.

News website "stuff.co.nz" report here:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/9884024/Thousands-march-against-TPPA