Camera and Watch: room cameras on your own network

Three modes

Camlane asks once, on first launch, and remembers. You can switch at any time without losing settings.

Mode	Where	What it’s for
Share camera and mic	Phone and computer	The phone is your computer’s webcam and microphone, for calls and streaming
Camera	Phone or tablet	The phone becomes a room or security camera with its own battery and recording settings
Watch	Computer (Android: in progress)	See every camera live, record them, and play back by time

Camera mode: the phone on the shelf

• Battery saver. Full frame rate while something moves or a face is in view, 5 fps after 3 seconds of stillness, and full rate again on the next movement. The bitrate follows, the screen can turn off and the Wi-Fi performance locks are released.
• Rest when unwatched. A camera nobody is looking at drops to one picture a second and wakes the instant you show it.
• Cool before it throttles. When the phone warms up, it lowers its frame rate, then its resolution, before Android starts throttling, and returns to your settings after a cool minute.
• Battery you can see. The phone reports its battery, charging state, draw and time left. The computer shows it on each camera and warns when a camera in battery saver runs on battery.
• It shows when it’s recorded. A recorded phone shows a red “Recording” pill and starts its notification with “Recording.”, so it’s visible with the screen off too. See recording people.
• No gaps in a power cut. If none of its computers answers, a phone in Camera mode records on itself, encrypted with a key that never leaves the phone (up to 5 GB and 1 week by default), and uploads it when a computer is back. It deletes each minute only once the computer has stored it.

Watch mode: the computer that watches

A computer in Watch mode is a recorder. It receives the cameras, records them, and shows them on the camera wall, with recordings and playback by time.

• Watch from other computers. Other computers on the network pair once with the recorder’s PIN and then see its cameras live, with each camera’s battery, time left and temperature. They can list recordings and download them as MP4; downloads resume after a dropped connection.
• Phones don’t pay for it. Each phone keeps one connection to the recorder. Live video is relayed exactly as the phone sent it, never re-encoded; over loopback the relay added 0.2 ms. A watcher on a slow link skips to the next keyframe instead of slowing anyone else down.
• Alerts. Battery at 20% and 10%, a recorded camera running on battery, a camera stepping down because it’s hot, and a camera offline for 30 seconds and back.
• Headless. camlane-cli watch runs the recorder on a computer without a screen, with the same settings as flags.

Watch on Android phones and tablets is in progress: a live wall, alerts and the timeline on another phone. Today, watching happens on a computer.

Everything stays on your network. To watch from outside it today, use a VPN you control, such as WireGuard or Tailscale. Remote viewing, end-to-end encrypted with no sign-in, is coming.