Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Using a Canon EOS camera as a webcam in Debian

schlachter.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 78 posts

Re: Using a Canon EOS camera as a webcam in Debian

#21

Post by ISL »

daggersandscars wrote: post #11
chomp wrote: post #2

Does this actually make a better picture? Won’t your stream still be super compressed by meet/zoom/etc?

It really makes a better picture. Zoom / Meet / Teams / etc does compress a ton, but a big part of the horrendous video quality are webcams. Another, potentially cheaper way to replace a webcam is to use the main (rear) camera of an old cell phone. Digital photography, especially using tiny sensors, is computational photography. Webcams are too cheap to have reasonable processing power internally and webcam companies…

Compression also works better on higher-quality video. The compression algorithm doesn't have to try to properly recover the noise.

Also, seconded on the difference a larger sensor and better glass make for a webcam.

Re: Using a Canon EOS camera as a webcam in Debian

#26

Post by failTide »

worthless-trash wrote: post #18
Gigachad wrote: post #17

Nice post, but that's way too much work to be worth it. You really want your camera and mic setup to just work rather than having to tell someone to wait 10 minutes to call because you need to reload your kernel module.

I think its perhaps the perfect way to avoid meetings.

and another great opportunity to tell everyone what OS you use

Re: Using a Canon EOS camera as a webcam in Debian

#28

Post by pdpi »

randomf wrote: post #20

I've been wondering for a while and can't find an answer to this: SD to USB adapters exist, but is it possible to hook up an SD-to-USB cable and have a driver present a virtual sd disk to the camera but write the video directly to your computer RAM via USB? That would solve the problem for all dSLRs.

That seems pretty roundabout, when you have solutions like the Elgato CamLink that just takes an HDMI input from your camera and shows up as a completely standard USB Video Class device to the OS.

Re: Using a Canon EOS camera as a webcam in Debian

#29

Post by pdpi »

chomp wrote: post #2

Does this actually make a better picture? Won’t your stream still be super compressed by meet/zoom/etc?

There’s a bunch of advantages even with bad video from meet or zoom.

Big sensor + nicer fast lenses means you require a lot less light. Nice fast glass means you can blur out the background optically without all the artefacts introduced by software background removal. If you use a zoom lens, you have a tonne of control over the framing.

Re: Using a Canon EOS camera as a webcam in Debian

#30

Post by randomf »

pdpi wrote: post #28
randomf wrote: post #20

I've been wondering for a while and can't find an answer to this: SD to USB adapters exist, but is it possible to hook up an SD-to-USB cable and have a driver present a virtual sd disk to the camera but write the video directly to your computer RAM via USB? That would solve the problem for all dSLRs.

That seems pretty roundabout, when you have solutions like the Elgato CamLink that just takes an HDMI input from your camera and shows up as a completely standard USB Video Class device to the OS.

Many models don't give you "clean" HDMI output. It's usually low-res with overlay junk.

edit: if the elgato can do it with HDMI, the question remains can it be done directly with SD out?

e2: also, SD card readers/adapters are cheap and plentiful, this seems like it should be easier to implement

Post reply on HN