A 100% free, no-frills, incredibly performant video capture viewer for Android tablets with no analytics or snooping.
Consolation is coming soon to the Play Store, or can be downloaded directly from this project's releases.
Consolation is a free app that enables your Android tablet to be used as a display for devices like gaming consoles, Raspberry Pis, and even a Mac mini or other PC, via a standard USB Video Class (UVC) video capture card.
Consolation is blazingly fast, with less real-time lag than anything you've ever used before on Android. Seriously, its performance will blow your mind. On capable capture cards (including many available for less than $30 online), it is difficult to notice any latency at all, even at 1440p/60 and higher.
The app is intentionally simple: watch the live video on your tablet. No recording or saving, no streaming to the internet. Just plug and play, privately with no ads or tracking. Consolation will never make an outbound network request or listen for inbound network connections.
Consolation does not collect, send, or share your data. Audio and video stay local and transient while you are watching a connected capture device. The app is open source, contains no trackers or analytics, makes no network calls, and does not record, stream, save, or analyze audio or video. Consolation has no idea what content is coming through your capture card's feed, and nothing leaves your device, ever.
Read the full privacy policy at PRIVACY.md or https://centennialoss.org/privacy/.
Any capture device that appears to the Android OS as a USB Video Class (UVC) capture device should work with Consolation.
Consolation has been tested by the developers on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra (SM-X900) with these capture devices:
- Elgato HD60 X - 👌 🚀
- Acer USB 3.0 Video Capture Card (model OCB5B0) - 👌 🚀
- WANKEDA 4K Capture Card 1080p 60FPS for Streaming (1da603d4) - 👌 🚀
- UGREEN Full HD 1080p Capture Card (model 40189) -
⚠️ max 30p @ 1920x1080
- Android device with a USB port
- Android OS 15 or higher
- A UVC-compliant video capture card
- Android Studio Panda 4 or higher
- Open the
Consolationdirectory in Android Studio - Build and run.
You can make a debug build with make build and a release build with make build-release.
We use libjpeg-turbo v3.1.4.1 unmodified to decode the MJPEG pixel format.
We vendored https://github.com/alexey-pelykh/UVCCamera into Consolation for Android. Alexey's project is a fork of https://github.com/saki4510t/UVCCamera which has gone dormant. We thank both projects for helping make Consolation for Android possible.
UVCCamera depends on https://github.com/libuvc/libuvc, which we have also vendored.
We have significantly modified our vendored UVCCamera and libuvc libs for stability and performance. These mods are in the codebase at Consolation/app/src/main/jni/UVCCamera and Consolation/app/src/main/jni/libuvc:
- eliminated nearly all frame copies, resulting in significant lag reduction
- added support for H.264, NV12, and P010 input pixel formats
- fixed defects in yuyv2iyuv and any2yuv frame handlers
- added support for input pixel format probe
- fixed protocol defects causing some capture cards to incur unnecessary startup delays
- numerous other performance improvements for a true real-time experience on modern Android devices with modern capture cards
We used UVCCamera's vendored https://github.com/libusb/libusb v1.0.18 and made a number of stability improvements on the code paths used by Consolation, including:
- improved device auto-detection and hot re-plug recovery
- better heap memory safety on hot and error paths
- fixed
itransfer->lockdeadlocks on error branch - fixed
libusb_lock_eventsdeadlock indo_close - protections against potential Java file descriptor leakage on Android
These changes are at Consolation/app/src/main/jni/libusb.
We really would like to contribute our changes back to their upstreams. But after significant research, we've determined that the lift is too great and our time is better spent improving the core Consolation project and continuing to maintain our modifications inside of this project. As this project is open source, anyone is welcome to attempt to port our improvements back to their respective upstreams or other forks.
We may publish our own separate disconnected fork of UVCCamera - specific to Android video capture and complete with our modified libusb and libuvc packages - that can be used as a drop-in replacement to take advantage of all of the stability and performance improvements we've introduced. Stay tuned.
- Our modified version of libusb is based on a 2014 release that was bundled with the original version of UVCCamera, and was already heavily modified to get working with Android. The latest release of libusb (1.0.29) is not compatible with Android, despite viable Pull Requests that add support having gone unmerged for years. Since other users have worked hard to make Android happen in the mainline libusb project, only to see their efforts go unacknowledged by that project's maintainers; we would not expect to be treated any differently.
- libuvc has not been updated in nearly 3 years with dozens of open PRs piling up, so it is unlikely that our overhaul would ever be incorporated into that apparently dormant or abandoned project.
- Alexey's UVCCamera fork has gained little traction since its creation in late 2024, is largely unchanged from Saki's original project, and has not seen a new release in over a year (and just a few months after the fork was created). It appears to be headed towards dormancy.
Humans write this software with AI assistance. All contributions are well-tested and merged only after being reviewed and approved by humans who fully understand and take responsibility for the contribution.
While we welcome pull requests and other contributions from other humans, including AI-generated code, we do not accept contributions from AI bots. A human must review, understand, and sign off on all commits. All contributors must be able to defend their contributions under reasonable technical scrutiny. Please file an issue to discuss any proposed feature before working on it.
Consolation and its logo are trademarks of Centennial OSS Inc. Use of the name and branding is not permitted for modified versions or forks without permission. See TRADEMARKS.md for details.