Webcam

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KenDown
Posts: 327
Joined: Wed 04 Apr 2018, 06:36

Webcam

Post by KenDown »

In these days of Zoom everything I found that doing a presentation over Zoom using my Display program put everyone to sleep - but equally, if I just stood in front of the camera it was equally boring. The solution? To include the output of the laptop's webcam in a corner of the screen, giving me the best of both worlds.

I found on my computer a BB4W program for capturing and displaying the output from a webcam. I don't know where I got it nor who wrote it - no copyright notice in the REMs - but it appears to have Richard's programming style. A little bit of fiddling and I had it incorporated in my Display program and it works just fine. Because bottom right is good most of the time, that's where it starts, but sometimes there is an important detail there, so I can position the video window in any corner or cause it to enlarge or return to the default size.

Unfortunately I could not get the video to enlarge. I had to close the video output window and then recreate it at the larger size, but of course there was a gap while the program set up the camera and began to capture video again. I was tearing my hair out until I noticed a call SYS "SendMessage", hWndC%, WM_CAP_SET_SCALE, 1, 0

I looked it up on the M$ website and for once was able to make sense of the cryptic instructions on that site. I changed the call to
SYS "SendMessage", hWndC%, WM_CAP_SET_SCALE, 1, TRUE
and now enlarging the window also enlarges the video output. Brilliant.

If it is indeed your program, Richard, many thanks.