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New Webcam capture software

rwg

By rwg
in DIY Astronomer

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rwg

rwg

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Ooops, that's not good... it's crashing inside the windows video capture code, rather than in my code. It probably means I'm feeding it the wrong information in some subtle way, but I can't see anything obviously amiss ;)

I'll put some additional information gathering in that area for the next release, to see if there is something going on. For now, all I could suggest is to check for up-to-date drivers and so on. Pretty weak as suggestions go, I'm afraid, sorry.

Robin

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Demonperformer

Demonperformer

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OK Robin, I wasn't going to say anything, but, although it worked [see my M5 thread] the frames per second box always reverts back to 25fps, no matter what I select.

This is with the mintron, so don't know if that is a problem because of being a different sort of camera?

Thanks.

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rwg

rwg

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Ok, so it's been cloudy again, so I've been tinkering - the result is v1.0.7:

Changes include :

  • A set of preview tranforms selectable from the toolbar :
  • * Highlight overexposed regions

  • * boost image brightness to show more shadow detail

  • * A quality of focus score displayed in the status bar (higher is better)

  • Support for custom frame rates as requested by DP. Just type the frame rate you want into the frame rate box and it's applied when you tab away from the box or press enter. It does work, but all the cameras I have have a limited range of frame rates - you can pick any rate inside the range, but picking one outside the range fails.
  • Extra logging to try to track down the issue posted by zhgutas
  • Doesn't start the preview twice at startup if you have a default profile saved any more

I think the focus score might be the most useful - it seems to work ok for terrestrial subjects, but I haven't had a chance to try it out on anything astronomical due to the cloud. Basically, the more big changes in colour/brightness there are from one pixel to the next in the frame, the higher the score.

Robin

SharpCap_1.0.7.zip

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rwg

rwg

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Wow, seams to be working for me too! Niiice... :) and thank you!

Marius

That's cool - I set the code up to try to continue anyway after the particular error you were having, but I expect you may find that you're unable to change the frame rate (it was trying to work out the list of available frame rates when it crashed last time...)

Robin

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  • 2 weeks later...
rwg

rwg

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So for the first time in ages I finally got a chance to do some imaging last night. The wind was really too strong to get any decent views, but it made for a better real life test of using SharpCap than I've had for a while.

My conclusions were :

* The focus score text is too small to see when you are actually adjusting the focus when observing. Also, it's too hard to read the flickering numbers. It needs some sort of graphical display. Todo...

* The image boost mode is handy - when I went from having mars fairly central in the eyepiece to putting the camera in, I got a black image on the camera. At that point I couldn't be sure I'd knocked the mount or the focus was way out. Turning on image boost I could see the ring of light from the out-of-focus image of mars, so I knew I just needed to focus. Actually, if mars was just out of view, I could see which way to go to find it because the image boost would show a brightening on that side of the frame - presumably from reflections in the tube/barlow.

* Image boost didn't work to bring out the spikes from a bahtinov mask - the brightness in the central region is too high to allow it to do much. Will look into making it more aggressive in lightening dark areas to see if that helps.

* I got hit by the dreaded Lifecam brightness change bug. This time the brightness was dropping sharply as the capture started, not increasing, but same problem. I have a workaround now which allows you to re-adjust the brightness between pressing 'start capture' and pressing 'OK' on the confirmation dialog. Actually, it allows you to adjust the camera/proc amp properties *during* capture too.

So, I've made v1.0.8, which includes the workaround for tweaking the lifecam brightness just before the start of capture. The next version after that will include a better focus score indicator and a super boost mode.

Hope it's useful

Robin

[EDIT : Fixed the problem with empty AVI files - download is back ]

SharpCap_1.0.8.zip

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rwg

rwg

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Hi, Thanks for the great application. But can this software work with QHY5? Regards, Tommy

The simple answer is that if it shows up in the devices menu, it should work; if it doesn't show up there, then SharpCap will most likely never support it.

There are two reasons for this - one is that cameras that don't make it to the devices list require very different handling to the cameras that do - a completely separate code path. Reason two is that even if I could work out what to do and how to do it, I don't have a device to test with.

sorry,

Robin.

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  • 3 weeks later...
zedds

zedds

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Hello Robin.

Thanks for sharing your software. I used it to capture a couple of avi`s of both Saturn and Mars. When capturing i have no camera control panel in the video control panel. I`m using windows XP professional. Any ideas.

Thanks again for taking the time to do this.

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rwg

rwg

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Hi Andy,

not sure if you mean that everything is greyed out in the control panel part when capturing (which is what is expected with 1.0.8), or that the controls are missing entirely but are visible in preview (which I wouldn't expect).

There are some gremlins with the way it handles the start of capture in 1.0.8 that I have now fixed, but I need to have a look at a couple of bugs before I can release the new version.

thanks,

Robin

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Demonperformer

Demonperformer

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Robin

A thought occurred to me ... don't know how easy/difficult this would be ... but while you are working on an upgrade, I mention it for what it is worth ...

Could the background of the panels be changed from grey to red? May make it easier to use at star parties when some people are doing visual obs and so want to maintain their dark vision?

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rwg

rwg

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Ah, ok, I see.

In previous versions of course, all the controls were disabled during capture - now it tries to keep them active. However it's necessary to basically rebuild the controls when you change from preview to capture (and vice-versa), since the thing that you are controlling changes from the preview version of the camera device to the capture version of the device.

SharpCap asks the camera device what controls are available whenever it starts a capture or preview - I'm kind of wondering if your neximage is basically responding to each request with 'nope, can't change that' when it is in capture mode, which means that the controls all disappear. At the moment, I can't think of any other good explanation, although that doesn't mean that there isn't one ;)

As to the red colour scheme - I've had a look and changing most of the colours isn't too hard, except for the borders of each window, which are set by the main Windows colour scheme. Would someone wanting to have this functionality have already set a custom windows colour scheme with dull red colours anyway perhaps? In which case I wouldn't have to worry about the borders...

Robin

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Demonperformer

Demonperformer

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Actually, Robin, the more I have thought about my 'colour scheme' idea, the less I think it would be useful. There are too many other things that would not be a suitable colour when switching on/off, using different programs, etc, which would all require a red gel mask anyway. I think it is one of those things that seemed like a good idea on the surface, until I actually gave it some thought.

XP seems to allow borders to be changed to blue, olive green or silver only.

I think in this instance my 'for what it is worth' was not very much:).

Thanks.

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zedds

zedds

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Ah, ok, I see.

In previous versions of course, all the controls were disabled during capture - now it tries to keep them active. However it's necessary to basically rebuild the controls when you change from preview to capture (and vice-versa), since the thing that you are controlling changes from the preview version of the camera device to the capture version of the device.

SharpCap asks the camera device what controls are available whenever it starts a capture or preview - I'm kind of wondering if your neximage is basically responding to each request with 'nope, can't change that' when it is in capture mode, which means that the controls all disappear. At the moment, I can't think of any other good explanation, although that doesn't mean that there isn't one ;)

Robin

Ok thanks Robin.

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  • 2 weeks later...
rwg

rwg

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Glad you like it :)

It all started because all the other capture programs seemed to take too many clicks of the mouse to do anything - annoying enough in a warm room under no pressure, absolutely fatal when you're outside on a cold night, wearing gloves, trying to get something done before the cloud rolls in...

Robin

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  • 1 month later...
rwg

rwg

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Rather unlikely, unfortunately.

Assuming that the QHY5 doesn't show up in the devices list in SharpCap at the moment, that would mean that it uses a different way to present itself to the OS than the DirectShow approach that is used by most webcams. Still cameras sometimes use WIA to do this or the very old TWAIN protocol. It's even possible that it uses something entirely bespoke and requires custom software/plugins to do the capturing.

In theory if it uses something like WIA, it would be possible to write something that grabbed frames and then fed them into DirectShow (I think), letting SharpCap do the work from there on. One of those things that you can't try without the hardware to test it with, sadly.

Robin

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