BeamCam turns any phone into a live camera you can watch from any other screen. Baby monitor, walkie-talkie, webcam, extra angle. Open a page, scan a QR code, and the video goes straight from one device to the other. It never lands on our servers.
open source · peer-to-peer · in your browser
Open beamcam.live on two devices. One films and the other watches, or you call each other. Or skip the network entirely and record what's in front of you.
This device films. It shows a QR code and a pairing code, and picks up the moment someone connects.
Any screen watches: laptop, tablet, another phone. Scan the QR code or type the pairing code.
Record your camera or your screen, with sound, straight to a file. Nothing leaves the device.
Video or audio, both ways. Share a QR code or a link: the other person picks "with video" or "audio only" and you're talking.
A tool is worth whatever people end up doing with it. Here's what BeamCam gets used for, and how to set each one up properly.
An old phone on the shelf, your phone in your pocket. You see the cot, you hear every sigh, and you can hold the talk button and whisper "shhh" without going in. No proprietary hardware or monthly fee, and no company's server watching your kid sleep.
It works from the next room or from the other side of town. Same house, same Wi-Fi or mesh: the video stays on your local network.
beamcam.live, tap Make this device a camera, allow camera + mic.Phone cameras don't have infrared. A dim nightlight still makes a huge difference.
Two phones, live picture, hold to talk. Garden to kitchen, workshop to house, upstairs to downstairs.
No account to create, no app to install for someone who'll never manage it. Send a link, she taps "Join with video", done. Works the same on her old tablet.
An audio call between the workshop and the house, the gate and the kitchen. Camera off by default, switch it on when you need to see who's there.
Your phone's back camera beats any laptop webcam. Open the viewer on your computer and capture that window in OBS. Its virtual camera then feeds Zoom, Meet or Teams.
Overhead shot of your hands, your whiteboard, your soldering iron, your guitar fretboard. For courses, streams and tutorials.
Is the dog on the sofa again? Check from work. Works across networks thanks to NAT traversal, not just at home.
3D printer, oven, kiln, a slow render on another screen. Point a phone at it and go do something else.
Your parents' router, the washing machine error code. Send them the link and look through their camera instead of guessing over the phone.
how it works
Tap Phone Camera. You get a random pairing code like cam-4k2x9q… and a QR code. Nothing to install or sign up for.
The QR code opens the viewer and connects on its own. Or type the code on a laptop. Both devices exchange a short handshake through beamcam.live.
After that handshake, WebRTC connects the two devices directly, encrypted end to end. The server only stepped in to make the introduction.
the part other camera apps leave out
Most "smart" cameras send your living room to a server so they can sell it back to you. BeamCam can't do that, because the video never reaches us.
current limits
You'll hit these limits eventually, so here they are now.
faq
No. BeamCam works across networks: 4G to home fibre, office to home. It uses STUN to find a direct path and falls back to a TURN relay when strict firewalls make a direct path impossible. On the same Wi-Fi or mesh network, the video goes over your local network and never touches the internet.
Yes. In Auto mode, the camera phone measures the available bandwidth and packet loss every two seconds and keeps three minutes of history. It settles on a bitrate and resolution the link has actually sustained, not just its best moment. It drops quality right away when the link degrades and climbs back one step at a time once it's clean, so the picture doesn't keep jumping around.
Any recent Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge, on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows or Linux. Camera access requires HTTPS, which beamcam.live has. Focus and exposure lock depend on the phone's hardware and browser and appear only when supported.
Yes, with one extra step. A web page can't register itself as a system camera. Open the viewer on your computer, add it as a Window Capture in OBS Studio and click Start Virtual Camera. Then select "OBS Virtual Camera" in your meeting app.
No. Live video goes device to device. The Local Recorder writes to your device's memory and gives you a file. Nothing is uploaded. There's no account, so there's nothing to tie a recording to even if we wanted to.
Streaming is camera + encoder + radio, all running continuously. Plan on keeping the camera phone plugged in. On mobile data, 1 Mbps is roughly 450 MB per hour. Auto mode or a manual 500 kbps cap keeps that down.
Yes. It's a static page, a PeerJS signaling server and coturn. The scripts are in the repo. See Under the hood → Self-hosting.
Ten seconds from now it could be a camera.