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Phone to phone video

M

MikeSh

Well-Known Member
I'm going to be replacing our terrestrial TV aerial soon and thinking about how to get the best alignment.

The obvious route is to get it all roughly set up, turn on the TV and FOX, get the FOX displaying signal strength, and then sit SWMBO in front with her phone and climb the ladder with my phone (and a spanner).

But I know how these things go and S is something of a goldfish, so I was wondering if there is a way to pass the video from one phone to display on the other one via the local wifi (Android phones) in which case I could just prop one phone up facing the TV unattended. I realize it could probably be done with Skype but don't really want to set up another account.
Does anyone know of an Android app or suchlike that would facilitate this? I've had a quick search but it seems to all be file transfer stuff.

Alternatively is there anyway to get this via the webif interface. I see there is some channel data in Diagnostics but the signal bars there are not going to be sensitive enough to be accurate - I really need to see the % numbers.
 
MikeSh said:
I see there is some channel data in Diagnostics but the signal bars there are not going to be sensitive enough to be accurate - I really need to see the % numbers.
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Those figures are fixed at whatever they were when the tune/scan was done. They don't change.
 
As we seem to be picking nits, I wonder how BH could "blew" the video on the other phone as well:)
 
Argh! Blame autocorrect for that (and I didn't type "argh" either). For "blew" read "view" (now corrected).
 
Thanks for all the replies (typo corrections excepted :p ).

prpr said:
Those figures are fixed at whatever they were when the tune/scan was done. They don't change.
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Ah. Didn't know that, but it would explain why all bar one were at 0 when I looked at it earlier.

Black Hole said:
A brief google produced this:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dngames.mobilewebcam&hl=en
...which as far as I can gather allows you to use an android phone as a webcam, which presumably you could then view with the other via your home WiFi.
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Black Hole said:
There was an app called Presence mentioned on Click this week, available for Android or iOS.
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Both of those (and a bunch more which were shown when I searched for Presence) appear to be web based - ie. the video is uploaded to a service you have to subscribe to and you then view it from there. If that's the only way to go then I'd be inclined to just use Skype; which might just be intelligent enough to make a direct connection on the local network.
In fact, rather than using the wife's phone I could use my daughter's laptop which has Skype on it already.

Ezra Pound said:
This is a bit of a different approach but, if you have a compass, you can get a baring (telling in which direction to point the aerial), from this site, you just enter your post code :-
http://www.digitaluk.co.uk/coveragechecker/main/index/dummy/NA/yes
Click to expand...
I've no problem getting the aerial pointing in the right compass direction. But there are a lot of trees in the line of sight and I'm going to be using a 16 element high-gain aerial, so I want to make sure it's grabbing the best path, possibly including some vertical angle as well. I'll also probably recheck it when the trees have leafed too.
 
MikeSh said:
At a glance that looks interesting (though I see $4.50 mentioned) but I don't have time to read it fully just now. I'll try and look at it tomorrow.
Click to expand...

  • One copy of IP Webcam (Free) (for continuous streaming).
  • One copy of SECuRET SpyCam ($4.50) (for motion-activated capture and alerts).
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Do you need motion-sensitive capture and alerts then???

(IIRC my search was "android web cam local network")
 
Black Hole said:
Do you need motion-sensitive capture and alerts then???
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Er, no. But as I said, I hadn't read it properly at that stage.

Turns out it's the same app as Ezra linked.

However, I'm now leaning toward using the laptop's built in camera instead of a phone - mainly because it will be easier to physically position. (You can bet that if I prop the phone up against a book it'll fall over just as I'm up the ladder juggling a pole, a spanner and the other phone :mad: .
However I've not found an equivalent app for Windows yet; one I have found will work directly over the home net but you still have to create an account on their server and log in to it which is a bit of a pain.
 
Black Hole said:
Blu Tack?
Click to expand...
:D

I'm going to use Skype after all. It was easier to just bung the app on my phone, create a profile and then 'connect' to the account already on the laptop. No faffing with IP addresses, etc.
I don't know if the picture is sent up to the servers and back or transferred locally - probably the former as it is about as laggy as when we use Skype properly. It seems good enough though. I'll let you know what happens in practice. (I've got the wall brackets and pole up today, hopefully get the aerial and lead done tomorrow. Then there is a bit of messing around with the loft wiring as there's an amp up there and I don't want to permanently trash the old aerial until I'm sure the new one is up to the job.)
 
Having waited a couple of days for a reasonably nice day I got the aerials swapped over and set up. Not a smooth process, but it's done (for now anyway).

I went with Skype but that proved a bit problematic.
Firstly it kept going 'low resolution' - really blurred/pixellated - after a short while, so I couldn't read the numbers on the TV. I have had this problem in a 'normal' Skype call too. I ended up moving the laptop much closer to the TV to try and compensate.
Secondly, it was prone to dropping the call. Eventually I set the Skype settings in the laptop to 'Auto answer' and 'Auto display video' so I could at least reconnect without going back the the TV.
If you are thinking about doing something like this I'd suggest trying some of the other suggestions rather than Skype.

A third, not Skype/video, issue is that the signal display on the Humax times out and drops back to TV after a few minutes. If the video link had been good this wouldn't have been too much of a problem, but the fuzzy picture meant it took longer than the Humax timeout, so I was up and down a couple more times.

The signal strengths I'm seeing are a bit weird, but I'll find somewhere else to post about that.
 
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