possibly if you are interested in doing this sort of thing, you will be interested in doing it with free software. in that case:
the debian debconf video team has been doing this for something like 15 years without the iphones and ipads, and without a limit of 4 camera angles, with 100% free software, and supporting live streaming (with simultaneous recoding to various bit rates) as well as just recording. they can fix unfortunate choices of camera stream after the fact for the final archived videos, too
i don't actually know what they use to push the rtmp video streams to the streaming server, but rtmp is very widely supported, since it's what twitch and youtube use for streaming video. obs studio can do this and is probably the most popular software for doing it; it's also 100% free software. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-... says that you can also use ffmpeg directly
In a similar vein, I've used VDO.ninja several times to easily stream an iOS device camera into OBS.
it just throws the camera stream onto a webpage, and then I load the page in OBS.
not zero latency but its "good enough" for me to use my phone as a simple extra webcam. works on basically anything that has a web browser + camera.
ooh, thanks! is vdo.ninja proprietary? if so, maybe something like mediasoup would enable a self-hosted version?
i like the idea of joining half a dozen cellphones to a jitsi chat or similar, then recording all of the streams and allowing on-the-fly stream selection to change camera angles for the live stream
I think the streaming happens P2P either way. So if you don’t self host it I don’t think you incur a latency hit. It should route the video straight from phone->PC. It doesn’t route through their server as far as I know. (Edit: I stand corrected. Their docs mention an encrypted TURN server may get used if a direct connection isn’t possible)
I do use the self hosted version anyway. Was pretty easy to setup.
the debian debconf video team has been doing this for something like 15 years without the iphones and ipads, and without a limit of 4 camera angles, with 100% free software, and supporting live streaming (with simultaneous recoding to various bit rates) as well as just recording. they can fix unfortunate choices of camera stream after the fact for the final archived videos, too
they document their setup at https://debconf-video-team.pages.debian.net/docs/index.html. the live video mixing software (to choose which camera angle to stream at any given time) is voctomix https://github.com/voc/voctomix which belongs to the ccc video operation center https://c3voc.de/
i don't actually know what they use to push the rtmp video streams to the streaming server, but rtmp is very widely supported, since it's what twitch and youtube use for streaming video. obs studio can do this and is probably the most popular software for doing it; it's also 100% free software. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-... says that you can also use ffmpeg directly
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Webcam#Encodingexample1 suggests getting ffmpeg input from your webcam with and i can successfully test my webcam with just but i think that integrating an audio stream is a little more hassle if you want to try doing it manually with ffmpeg command lines (details in https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide and https://www.baeldung.com/linux/ffmpeg-webcam-stream-video). if you want a gui just use obs studio