Re: A web-cam detection library ?

[Filippo Argiolas <fargiolas gnome org>]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 7:40 AM, Nicolas Bertrand <nico inattendu org> wrote:

Hi

>> It's not exported yet but we could do it if you think it fits your
>> needs, it just needs some cleanup, annotations, documentation and
>> bindings if you want to use it in python.
>>
> I think it can be very useful. For other applications who uses a webcam
>> It would be great to share common stuff and avoid duplication as much
>> as possible, we also have a gtk widget that displays the video stream
>> coming from the camera, and that is already being used in the new
>> GNOME user account dialog, you might want to look at that too.
>>
> All right , I go to have closer look on cheese source code.

Great, let us know what you think!

> What it is the GNOME user account dialog. It uses a camera ?  I m' just
> a gnome user ;-)

It uses CheeseAvatarChooser to display camera preview, take a photo
and crop it to use it as the account icon.
CheeseAvatarChooser itself uses CheeseWidget which is the very same
widget we use to initialize the camera and display the preview.
Take a look at http://www.hadess.net/2010/01/user-accounts-dialogue.html
for more infos.

>> Please feel free to share your thoughts and tell us what's missing,
>> what you like and what you don't, what we need to improve.
>> Regarding the gstreamer bin creation, are you aware of camerabin?
>>
> No I'm not aware of the camerabin. It is new ? I don't have it in
> gstreamer 0.10.14 under ubuntu karmic. According  doc it looks very
> useful for my needs !

It's the gstreamer bin used in maemo5 (and I guess 6 and meego) to
manage the phone camera.
It's in gst-plugins-bad since some time now, don't know the exact
version it entered it though.

>> Changing a little bit the whole point of view, have you ever thought
>> of working directly in Cheese to add your stop motion video features?
>> We already have some basic time lapse function, it would be great to
>> add a custom mode for stop motion video making!
>>
>>
> I don't know if it is possible. Its true that stuff in cheese is
> duplicated in luciole.  And the same philosophy on the easy to use.
> Luciole is intended to be used also by children
>
> For stopmotion I have some specific needs : as fitting the image size in
> a DV format, and 2  treeview with image . One for the acquired image
> like in cheese, and another for mounting ( like a timeline) . In this
> one I can change the image order, duplicate /delete/import image , set a
> framerate, and a preview of the movie ( sequence of image). And also
> some other specific features like export to DV or MPEG2 format, and
> export for other video tools ( cinellera/pitivi/kdenelive)

Actually now that I think about it I'm not so sure it really fits in
cheese. I mean, our main goal when we decided to split cheese into
UI+libraries was to give the chance to other developers to reuse some
of our code so that different apps can concentrate on different use
cases while sharing the same infrastructure. So it will be just great
to have your app reuse our code while focusing on its different
target.

> By the way , I'll be pleased to work on cheese  for the webcam
> detection  library and python binding (even if I never work on writing
> code bindings) and more ...

Great, and I'll be pleased to review and commit your patches (exams permitting)


Filippo