Recording iPhone to Macbook?

[Takeo]

Hey guys!

 

I've been looking for a solution which allows me to use the rear camera of my iPhone 6s and record the stream directly to my MacBook Pro 2013.

The key is: 1080p 60fps.

 

So far, I've come across and tested ...

1. OBS Studio with the OBS Camera App for iOS
   Technically works, but I have yet to find the correct settings for it to run smoothly. It looks like I can't feed the stream fast enough to the device (neither via USB, nor via WiFi)
2. Quicktime Screen Capturing
   This is good for viewport adjustments, but there is no way to record from the camera. This just records the display which reduces quality significantly.
3. EpocCam
   Didn't really work well either.

Do you guys see any reasonable possibility for this?

[.Apex.]

39 minutes ago, Takeo said:

Do you guys see any reasonable possibility for this?

Try IVCam

 

Edit: oh it's only for Windows

[Takeo]

1 minute ago, _Syn_ said:

Try IVCam

 

The issue I have is most likely the data transfer speed between my phone and my MacBook.

Currently, I'm looking into the lightning port and the possibility for 5 GHz connection.

1. The lightning cable apparently only support USB 2.0 (at theoretical 450Mbit/s) which is way too low I guess

2. Though you can connect your phone to a 5 GHz network, you cannot connect the phone and the macbook to each other on the 5 GHz band (Hotspot). It only allows for 2.4 Ghz. (Might be wrong)

 

Am I missing something?

[.Apex.]

3 minutes ago, Takeo said:

1. The lightning cable apparently only support USB 2.0 (at theoretical 450Mbit/s) which is way too low I guess 

450Mbit/s is plenty for streaming video, technically it shouldn't have any problems with that, but I don't know what causes it to perform worse than WiFi for me, on IVCam I can do 1080p 60FPS "Medium" just fine on WiFi, it starts to stutter on High and network usage is upwards of 40Mbps+, but on USB it even stutters on Medium, quality on Medium is great for a webcam though, don't think you need any more than that, I assume the "quality" thing just changes the bitrate, so if you have that option in other applications I suggest you lower it
 

12 minutes ago, Takeo said:

2. Though you can connect your phone to a 5 GHz network, you cannot connect the phone and the macbook to each other on the 5 GHz band (Hotspot). It only allows for 2.4 Ghz. (Might be wrong) 

I have no clue why that wouldn't work, is it hardware limitation?

[Takeo]

46 minutes ago, _Syn_ said:

I have no clue why that wouldn't work, is it hardware limitation?

Not sure. Most likely, it's just Apple being too lazy to implement stuff.

 

I dug a little deeper (or rather looked to possible other sources of the problem) and found that my CPU usage spikes to almost 100% when recording. 720p/30fps is doable. 1080p/30fps is the limit, although even here I get some tearing and frame drops.

 

I guess my Laptop isn't up to the task. (No dedicated GPU sucks)

[.Apex.]

12 minutes ago, Takeo said:

found that my CPU usage spikes to almost 100% when recording

I thought you were only streaming it to your laptop? does it spike to 100% as well? (not recording)

[Takeo]

1 minute ago, _Syn_ said:

I thought you were only streaming it to your laptop? does it spike to 100% as well?

Yes. The setup is as follows:

 

iPhone 6s ----- Lightning_Cable ----> MacBook Pro

 

The OBS Camera App streams 720p/30fps to the macOS OBS Studio App and that saves it to a file on the Desktop (ssd).