I’m interested to know what setups you all have to use a webcam with Shadow?
For my part I have a 50Mbit down / 8Mbit up home connection. I have a Shadow Ghost and various other devices and laptops that I can run shadow on. Using the straight USB over IP functionality of Shadow is no good as the uncompressed video feed of the webcam (in this case just a simple Logitech c270) overwhelms the upload capacity of the connection and introduces tearing in the webcam footage and lag in the rest of the experience.
My solution:
Local PC uses the webcam and the sets up a Skype meeting room with the webcam footage. On the Shadow I then join the Skype meeting room and use OBS to capture the window and provide a software webcam on Shadow which can then be used in any other application. I’ve successfully used this in Discord. I use the microphone functionality of Shadow separately to capture that but it could easily be captured through the Skype feed. This setup seems to use 1-2Mbit upload speed and doesn’t seem to impact the lag of Shadow noticeably. It’s also almost realtime with max 1s delay in the feed which is necessary with online meetings.
Until I found this solution I experimented with streaming via OBS and YouTube from the local PC as there is a lot more control over the bitrate of the video feed. Unfortunately this introduces about 15s of delay though so was unacceptable as a solution.
It would be great if Shadow were to build in pre-compression of webcam footage to make these useable.
What have been your results? Perhaps your webcams are working perfectly fine as you have more upload bandwidth? Perhaps I’m just doing something fundamentally wrong?
