Digital video camera as a webcam. video art

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Digital video camera as a webcam

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Introduction

Video conferencing, Internet chatting and other similar features of the World Wide Web have long been known and widely used by thousands of people around the world. For video conferencing, many well-known and unknown companies produce dozens of models of so-called Web cameras. A modern webcam is a small camcorder the size of a pack of cigarettes, mainly with a USB interface, with a resolution of no more than 640x480 and a frame rate of up to 25 per second, but depending on the resolution.

The cost of Webcams is usually in the range of $100. Since the maximum possible speed via USB does not exceed 1 MBytes / s, the parameters of the transmitted video signal from a USB camera, in principle, cannot be of high quality. In addition, it is clear that such cheap cameras do not have good lenses, optical zoom, etc. attributes of significantly more expensive conventional digital video cameras.

A natural question arises - is it possible to use a digital video camera as a Web camera and thereby solve two problems at once:

do not spend money on buying a special Web camera;
get high quality images.

The essence of the problem of using a digital video camera is that all video conferencing programs use the Video For Windows interface to work with the camera, and video received from a digital video camera via the IEEE-1394 interface can only be received through the DirectShow interface, which is not supported by video conferencing programs. If you already have a video card with a video input (or a TV tuner), then the problem is solved simply - the camera is connected to the computer via its analog output and that's it. And if there are no such devices in the computer and you don’t want to buy?

This article is intended to answer this question.

TeVeo Video Suite

TeVeo Video Suite is designed to solve the following tasks:

showing video from a video camera to everyone on the network - the video camera receives a specific address and a link to it can be given on its own Web page or sent to all friends and / or business partners.
displaying video from a video camera only to a certain circle of people to whom the owner of the camera will tell the password for access to it.
communication through the network with other owners of video cameras also registered on the TeVeo website.

Digital video camera as a webcam

The program is completely free and anyone can use it. It supports both Video For Windows and DirectShow, so it can be used with any digital video camera, regardless of its type. It works under both Windows 98/Me and Windows 2000.

To work with the program, you just need to download it, and then register on the teveo.com website, after which you will see your camera in the list and receive a link to its address on the network. The only significant disadvantage of working through TeVeo is the lack of sound transmission in the free version. But this problem is solved by connecting NetMeeting for voice-only communication.

After registration, the camera will be included in the list of Web cameras (the camera must be turned on) and it can be easily found by the initial letter of its name.

By clicking on the name of your camera, you can get its normal image.

By selecting the appropriate button below the image, you can send yourself an e-mail with the exact address of the camera, which can be sent to everyone. To communicate with a friend or colleague, you can enter the chat, where you can work with sound.

Digital video camera as a webcam

Working with NetMeeting

NetMeeting is a free program from Microsoft that makes it easy to communicate with friends and colleagues, no matter where they are. It can also be used to work within an organization on its local network. Its most important drawback from the point of view of the owner of a digital video camera is that it only supports Video For Windows and therefore does not see the connected digital video camera. Nevertheless, whoever searches will always find a solution to this problem under Windows 98/Me. It is the use of NetMeeting with a digital video camera that will be discussed in this section.

NetMeeting itself can be easily rewritten from the Microsoft site, but to work with it, you will additionally need a very interesting SoftCam program, a 30-day version of which can be easily downloaded from softcam.com. You can extend the life of the program either by purchasing it, or by finding alternative solutions to this problem on the Web. What is the idea of this program? It is very simple - the program allows you to capture any image from the Windows screen and at the same time it is installed under Windows as a video capture device.

In addition, you need a program to display video from a camcorder on the Windows desktop. After testing for compatibility with SoftCam, it turned out that ScenalyzerLive, which is available to almost every owner of a digital video camera, is ideal for this. Moreover, for these purposes, it is quite possible to use an unregistered version of ScenalyzerLive.

Next, you simply install SoftCam, start ScenalyzerLive, NetMeeting, and select SoftCam as the video capture device in the NetMeeting settings, as shown in the figure:

Digital video camera as a webcam

The SoftCam capture window (usually brown) is then "stretched" onto the ScenalyzerLive window. The SoftCam capture window is easily resizable and can be set to the desired size by dragging the corner of the capture window with the mouse. The result of all manipulations is illustrated in the figure below:

Digital video camera as a webcam

This method does not allow you to use the sound from the camcorder, but you can work with a regular cheap microphone for a computer without any problems.

We recommend interesting articles Section video art:

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