I’ve got a Canon PowerShot A75 digital camera, and I’d like to use it to display images directly onto my computer monitor. It does have AV out, but neither my monitor nor my graphics card have AV in.
By plugging it into the PC through USB, the software that came with it allowed me to use a “remote capture” feature - and part of this displays direct footage from the camera onto the screen. However, it cannot be resized to a usable size.
Can anyone recommend some software that will let me do this? It doesn’t have to do anything else - just take footage from the camera and display it directly onto the screen at full-screen, or near-full-screen size.
He wants to use it as a webcam. You cannot resize the “View/Video” mode images on a camera to full screen and still have it look OK. The resolution is too low. The highest I’ve ever seen is around 920x640 and your camera probably does at most 640x480 at 15fps.
If you found software to actually utilize the full capture resolution of your camera (5mp?) it would give you about 0.3 to 0.5 frames per second at best since capture resolution is slow.
I do want to use it basically as a webcam, but without the “web” part. It doesn’t need to broadcast anything anywhere, just display on the monitor. Real time. Like when you walk past the window of an electronics shop and they’ve plugged a video camera into a TV, and you can see yourself walk past.
I realise that the resolution’s not going to be great - if there’s some software that will let me vary display size, resolution and frame rate to get what I’m looking for, it would be fantastic.
I don’t think that you’ll find any such software solution from anyone but the camera manufacturer (in your case Canon) themselves.
Although there is a semi-universal standard that makes digital camera memory appear as an external drive to a PC connected via USB (in which case 3rd-party software can use standard OS drivers to read from and write to the camera memory), there is no such standard for streaming real-time images, except for a “video mode” in which cameras provide a live image using the local video standard (usually NTSC or PAL). The OP mentions that no video-input card is available, so that’s not an option with the available hardware.
The software that Fromage A Trois desires would need to have the ability to control camera parameters, take images, etc, in real-time over USB. I’m reasonably certain that the Canon PowerShot A75 doesn’t have this capability.
In fact, the software that comes with the camera does let me do this - I can zoom in and out, and change other settings, from the desktop. The only problem is the display on the screen is only small.
Thanks for your help, I’ll see if Canon have any other software that may help, or… I could simply change the monitor’s resolution while I’m doing this - that way the small window in this software would take up more of the screen.
Unless you’re flat broke, you’re going to spend more time and effort working on this than just buying a dedicated USB webcam (or popping for a new graphics card). A quick web search turned up webcams for $18.00 US and up.
Granted you already have the digital camera, but it’s just going to be easier to buy a dedicated bit of hardware.
Or perhaps one of the cheap digital video cameras? I noticed one at Wal-Mart, part of the axis of evil I know, that was a digital video, digital still, and MP3 player, for less than $100.
I suspect part of the reason for the small video image is the low bandwidth of USB. The “pipe” isn’t big enough for full-screen full-motion video; you have to choose either between a small video or a large still image/low frame rate.