Harry's GPS Suite Forum

Has anyone tried the Mobius camera with an Android phone?

http://www.buymobius.com

It's pretty inexpensive--about $75. It produces H.264 video. You can get either an 86° lens or 131° (image looks a bit fish-eye).

I'm thinking to run it without an SD card, in web-cam mode, connected to my Android phone using USB.

What do you guys think? Will it work?

Greg

OK, I declare this experiment a failure.

I bought the Mobius camera and the special on-the-go USB cable (so that the Android device is master, and camera is slave).

I installed this app: Mobius ActionCam

The app was able to access the camera and display live video on the screen of my Nexus 10 tablet running Android 5.1.1.

Next I tried the same thing with LapTimer: Timer -> Video -> external cam only.

Result: no camera found.

I guess USB cameras aren't supported in LapTimer. Oh well.

Too bad. At about $80, it would be an inexpensive way to add HD video to LapTimer.

Greg

Each cam comes with its own interface. There is neither a standard nor a common de facto standard by an industry leader all others copy. Only cams listed on the compatibility pages will be connected and remote controlled by LapTimer. However, you can always record footage manually in a standard format and add them later to LapTimer. Instructions can be found in Video Documentation on www.gps-laptimer.de/documentation.

- Harry

Harry--

There must be some small set of common functionality among USB webcams, since I can plug any (as far as I know) USB webcam (including the Mobius) into my laptop (Linux), and any app will be able to use it. That is, I can capture photos and videos in one app ("Cheese" webcam booth on Linux), or have video chats in another app (Google Hangouts in Chrome). The OS has made the camera available in some standard way, without any specific device drivers. I believe it's the same for USB webcams on MacOS and Windows.

Maybe more advanced things like changing settings (resolution, white balance, etc.) is different from one USB webcam to another, but it seems like basic video capture is the same.

What am I missing here? Something different about Android? Although, Android runs a Linux kernel, so that seems unlikely...

Greg