Friday, March 22, 2013

How to use a GOPRO Hero 3 Black edition as a webcam

Ever since I got this camera I was wondering if one could use it as a webcam.

Well you can, I figured it out.

You need Manycam, VLC media player and Wigo

Manycam only supports mjpeg streams but the gopro streams in h.264 so it cannot naively connect to the camera, hence why vlc is needed to transcode and re-stream the video.
Note, the video stream is 432x240 so not very high resolution.
Also, there is about 3-4 seconds latency.. to be expected with WiFi and transcoding in the pipeline..

In case you do not want to write out the URLs in VLC and Manycam:

http://10.5.5.9:8080/live/amba.m3u8
http://127.0.0.1:8080/go.mjpg

This playlist has the instructions as well as a few tests.




Have fun! Now you can Skype people from the shower hahahaha :D
(or pool in your back yard... etc)
Any application that uses a webcam could take advantage of this, such as ustream, chattroulette, Facebook video messaging...


I use virtual audio cable
http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm
And set the output device on vlc to that instead of my speakers, since manycam doesnt seem to support using the audio stream from vlc/the gopro

What I really need is to be able to connect to h.264 streams in manycam with audio.
Hopefully enough people will like this so that they add the feature, and there's quite a bit  of desire for a phone app as well.

Here are a few sample videos I've taken with the camera.. imagine the applications! You could use a gopro to have a google+ hangout while diving, or ustream from a wireless portable camera..