How can I receive 2 video streams from 2 Android phones over USB tethering using IP Webcam?

Question

For a Live DJ streaming setup (on a budget), I would like to be able to receive two or more video streams from two or more Android phones via USB tethering using the IP Webcam android application. It works with one phone, but when I try to add a second phone, I can't connect to it.

Both phones start a server on the same IP at port 8080. I can't change the IP address directly in the app, but I can change the port. I tried changing the port on one of the phones, but the connection is still not possible.

I can't seem to find if receiving data from 2 USB tethering sources, at the same time, is possible or not. So my first question would be the following: is it possible? And if yes, how could I start to solve this problem?

Thank you.

Answer 1

USB tethering is not necessary, just use adb port forwarding. It allows you to connect to multiple devices via USB. On the PC you need Android Debug Bridge from Android SDK installed. On OSX the simplest way should be using brew and install android-platform-tools.

And on all Android device the development menu has to be enabled and the Debug Bridge mode has to be activated.

First get a list of connected devices via to get the device ID of each device.

adb devices

Example output with the two devices HABY39RL and DARY42EE:

List of devices attached
HABY39RL        device
DARY42EE        device

Next establish a port forwarding for each device:

adb -s <device ID 1> forward tcp:8080 tcp:8080
adb -s <device ID 2> forward tcp:8081 tcp:8080

Afterwards you can connect to the web cam app on the first device on the PC using the address localhost:8080 and on the second device using localhost:8081.