Social networking is relying more and more on video chat services. From ooVoo and Google Hangouts for fun social get together to Skype for more serious business meetings, video chat is becoming more and more common among social network users.
If you do not already have a laptop in use regularly, however, the chances are you will need a new webcam to take advantage of these services. Laptops today come with integrated webcams, but desktop users must buy a separate webcam in order to take advantage of these social chat services. Older webcams are often very primitive in their megapixel capacity and are often not adequate for today’s broadband video needs. With a little ingenuity and an Android smart phone, however, you may be able to utilize the newer camera integrated into your Android device instead of buying a brand new webcam for your desktop.
SmartCam
The application called SmartCam can help you utilize your smart phone’s camera with your desktop. You will need a wifi connection on your local home network or Bluetooth connectivity on your desktop in order to use SmartCam.
How to?
The first thing you will need to do is to install the Android client on your smart phone and then install the desktop client on your PC computer in order to get the devices to connect to each other.
Once you have installed the clients on both your smart phone and your PC, you will need to set up your connection type. If you are going through a WiFi connection, you will need to make sure your computer and smart phone are both connected on the same network.
Sometimes if your phone is set to automatically connect to detected networks then it may connect to a neighbor’s WiFi. It may also be possible that your WiFi connectivity has been turned off and you are going through your 3G connection. Sometimes it is not immediately apparent, so make sure you check to make sure you are on the right WiFi connection. Once you have done this and selected TCP/IP (WiFi) as your connection type, enter in the local IP address of your desktop computer as the Remote Server.
You can find your desktop IP address through going through your Windows command prompt using the IPConfig command. The easiest way to get to your command prompt is to go to your start bar and then click the RUN command. In the prompt type the letters “cmd” and hit enter. This should open up a black command prompt window with a blinking cursor. At the cursor type the command “ipconfig /all” and then hit enter. This will display all of your local networking information from your network adapters.
There could be several blocks of information from your network adapters, such as Bluetooth and Ethernet. Find the block with the header “Wireless LAN adapter Wi-Fi”. This is the adapter for your wireless connection. The first thing to look for is confirmation that you are on the same network as your smart phone. This is found through the “Connection-specific DNS Suffix” line, which should show the name of your private wireless network. You can find your IP address on the line “IPv4 Address”. This IP number will most likely begin with the numbers 192.168 and then be followed by two more sets of numbers.
Next, go back to your smart phone and turn on the SmartCam application. Select Connect WiFi from the menu and after a few seconds the image from your smart phone camera will show up on your desktop SmartCam application.
Once connected, you can choose to either stream the image or save the image to a video file.
Congratulations!
Author Bio: The post is shared by Michael Clark. He is a freelance writer and contributes many articles related to free webcam chat on different websites. Apart from that, he loves to cook food and often cooks for his family whenever free. -techpaparazzi
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