Sony cameras can now be used as webcams for Mac

I've dug around and the only real option is an HDMI capture card paired with a decent camera (I read this Sony software option is lower quality, but at least it's progress).

LG camera setups target businesses and are generally overpriced crap (I have one - the LG meetup) with proprietary connections and mediocre cameras, and crappy mics/software.

The Facebook Portal is a magnitude better and 10% of the price, but it's FB - they do support zoom now though so that's a decent option.

Computer webcams top out at not very good logitech USB devices.

You'd think there would be a high-end market targeting streamers with computer cameras focused just on that in-between the mirrorless/DSLRs for photography.

I'd love to see better products in this space:

- High quality camera for videochat that can be connected to a computer.

- High quality camera/mic that can be attached to a TV.

- Dumb TV, high quality panel, that starts up fast, has a lot of ports, no internet connection, with a remote designed by someone who thought for 5min about what buttons are required this century.

A dumb TV with a high quality camera mic setup might be interesting - plug in a mac mini and be good to go.

Re: Sony cameras can now be used as webcams for Mac

#7

Post by Bishonen88 » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #4

I've plugged lots of webcams into a mac and they just work. I think apple must use a standard protocol. chances are they work on mac, they'll work on linux too.

This is a software for DSLR's/mirrorless and other 'Full-fledged' cameras, not webcams. Macbooks do not have an hdmi in, and passing video through usb wasn't a standard for those cameras until lately (and still isn't). So macbook or windows didn't matter in this case.

Re: Sony cameras can now be used as webcams for Mac

#8

Post by ValentineC » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 8:05 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #6

It's kind of wild to me how there's such a product vacuum for this stuff. I've dug around and the only real option is an HDMI capture card paired with a decent camera (I read this Sony software option is lower quality, but at least it's progress). LG camera setups target businesses and are generally overpriced crap (I have one - the LG meetup) with proprietary connections and mediocre cameras, and crappy mics/softwar…

This might be for different uses, but I'd rather Apple bring their iPhone front camera to the MacBooks. It's crazy that MacBook cameras still top out at 720p.

Re: Sony cameras can now be used as webcams for Mac

#9

Post by floatingatoll » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

Mac support is implemented using a CoreMediaIO plugin, hinting that they are not updating the camera firmware to speak USB webcam, which prevents driverless use of the device:

    /Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins/DAL/ImagingEdgeWebcam.plugin

Could someone with a Sony camera please verify on macOS 10.15 (with ASR enabled) whether this webcam support is usable from within Apple's desktop FaceTime app? What protocol version and speed of USB does it negotiate with the computer, assuming you're using a modern USB cable and not the one it shipped with?

That plugin contains `LjAdapter`, the same name used on both Mac and Win, and specifically `Lja_PTP_USB.dylib/dll` — hinting that they've written a convertor that takes in USB Picture-to-Picture protocol and writes out USB Web Camera protocol.

I get the distinct impression that this is a list of USB device IDs. Those of you who know how to spoof USB manufacturer and device IDs may want to try spoofing any random off-the-shelf USB PTP webcam with one of these and see if you can use this library to speak to it.

    [Dev:%lx]
    0x0CCC, 0x0C43, 0x0D2B, 0x0D18, 0x0D1C, 0xD9F, 0x0DA3

Re: Sony cameras can now be used as webcams for Mac

#10

Post by jseliger » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

It's fascinating to watch the camera companies slowly catch up to where Elgato was years ago; their failure to "think beyond the box" may help explains why camera sales peaked around 2012 and have been falling ever since.

Don't get me wrong: I still have a standalone Fuji camera, but I'm unusually interested in photo aesthetics. For most people, ease of use and convenience wins, and that it took this long for Sony to release software to enable this pretty obvious functionality explains what's wrong with most of the big camera companies.