Direct USB Connection (Pi Zero / Zero W only): This is probably the best connection.

There are four main ways to connect your Raspberry Pi to your PC: (Image credit: Tom's Hardware) Getting Your Best Connection between Pi and PCĦ. If you already have a Raspberry Pi camera module installed or know how to use one, then you can skip down to the next section and step 6.

Installing the Raspberry Pi Camera Module If you don’t already have one set up, see our guide on how to do a headless install on Raspberry Pi so you can control it from your computer.

A microSD Card with Raspbian: It almost goes without saying that you’ll need the official Raspberry Pi OS.The faster and more reliable the connection, the better chance you’ll have to limit lag and freezing pictures. With a Zero / Zero W, you can do a direct USB connection to your PC, but with other models, you’ll need to use Ethernet or Wi-Fi. While more powerful models such as the Raspberry Pi 4 B may be able to handle higher frame rates with aplomb, the most important thing is the strength of the connection between the Pi and your PC. A Raspberry Pi: You can use a Raspberry Pi Camera Module with any recent-era Raspberry Pi, but the Raspberry Pi Zero / Zero W might be the best choice.Most of these modules don’t come with a mounting bracket so you’ll need to get creative (perhaps with tape) and / or buy a case in order to position one on top of your monitor or in another optimal position. They cost as little as $10, but we recommend using one of the better-quality models such as the official Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2 which goes for around $25 (we used cheap models for our tests and the low-light performance was not good). A camera module: Raspberry Pi Camera modules use a ribbon cable to connect to the Pi’s proprietary CSI camera port.After combing through a lot of resources, including this very helpful thread, I see that there was at one time a way to have a Pi Zero become a literal USB webcam in Windows, but it doesn’t appear to work with recent builds of Raspbian.

While there are a few potential ways to get video from your Raspberry Pi to appear on your PC in Skype, Meet, Zoom or other conferencing apps, the only method I’ve found that works is to stream the Pi’s video using mjpg_streamer and then receive it on the Windows (or Linux or macOS) side where another app makes the OS think that the stream is a webcam.

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