Easy solution, don't use macOS.
Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
141–150 of 665 posts
Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
#142> Software development isn’t free
Part of the burden of this is on us.
If a digital camera OS is a small embedded system running on a microcontroller it has a fixed cost, and lasts forever, just like the electrical components.
If it’s an instance of chromium running on Ubuntu server or Android, with hundreds of dependencies in your program alone than the cost to stop it from bricking is effectively infinite. (I’m even aware of medical surgery devices using Electron these days)
Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
#143I also discovered that I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously. The problem however wasn't Canon, but that I lived in a region (EU) that would have imposed a customs tariff on cameras that could do that, but by keeping it under that, the camera would be classed as a 'stills' camera and so was therefore exempt. Admittedly this is different from the case in the article - but it…
Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human, so that their action figures would be classified as "toys" rather than "dolls" and thus charged a lower tariff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat...
Or my shirt that has a tiny, useless pocket on the inside of my shirt (down where it might often be tucked inside of your waistband.) It has a tag with a picture of sunglasses on it, and a reasonably sized pair of sunglasses might just tenuously perch inside.
This makes it a jacket, and jackets are taxed at a lower rate than shirts.
The same shenanigans more or less work for most types of taxation. There’s always an angle to reduce or even eliminate taxes, unless you work on salary or for wages. It’s clear who the system is built for lol.
Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
#144Is there a reason OP can't get themselves a $50 USB capture card and a $20 HDMI cable, and use OBS to capture the feed from the HDMI-out in the camera? Most decent capture cards also expose themselves as cameras to almost all applications. This is my setup, and it works perfectly. Nikon D7500 as a webcam. More professional setups use Atomos monitors with built-in NVMe drives mounted directly to the camera. I generall…
Sure. I can do anything. It's the principle of the thing.
The principle is to use the right tool for the job.
USB can do just about anything. Video out is one possibility. But HDMI can already do that.
It doesn't make sense to expect the manufacturer to provide a free app to make USB do something you can already do over HDMI, and for which HDMI is intended.
This article is rage bait where there's no real cause for outrage. But it's adjacent enough to "right to repair" and "subscription fatigue" that it sounds outrageous.
Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a relic left over from a bygone era. Like the digital storage levy we still pay despite music and movie piracy only being rampant from 1990s-2000s :) I love the EU but it certainly has its idiosyncrasies.
This levy is not meant for piracy, but for legal access - like copying the CDs you already bought to your phone. Compared to what we used to pay on blank media it's not so bad. If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...
> If the alternative is that you are not allowed to keep private copies of anything...
That's of course not the only alternative. But the recording media levy isn't that bad at least in Finland. The income from those is distributed directly to authors and artists, skipping the labels and publishers altogether.
Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
#146I also discovered that I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously. The problem however wasn't Canon, but that I lived in a region (EU) that would have imposed a customs tariff on cameras that could do that, but by keeping it under that, the camera would be classed as a 'stills' camera and so was therefore exempt. Admittedly this is different from the case in the article - but it…
Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human, so that their action figures would be classified as "toys" rather than "dolls" and thus charged a lower tariff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat...
This sort of thing happens relatively often; Sony also tried (unsuccessfully) to have the PS2 deemed a personal computer (which would have lead to 0 tariffs in the EU): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic#PlayStation_2
Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
#147In case you are considering Nikon as an alternative, their Webcam Utility might be free, but it doesn't work on the latest version of macOS. There are 3rd party utilities (paid), but I had trouble with autofocus when I tried them. I wish camera manufacturers put half as much effort into usability as smartphone companies. Why does a camera need drivers to be recognized as a webcam at all? Why doesn't my 2000€ camera c…
> Why doesn't my 2000€ camera come with GPS and LTE built in? 2 seconds later on HN: why does my 2000€ camera spies on me? If you want a smartphone, use one, leave us be with our sane tools.
The problem is that right now, you need to install a Nikon Spyware app on your smartphone if you want geotagged photos.
If the camera had GPS built-in, you could have geo-tagged photos without needing spyware on your phone.
Geotagged photos are extremely useful, there's a reason why they sell GPS dongles for cameras. Cameras really should have that built-in (and I think the top-of-the-line models do)
Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
#148Is there a reason OP can't get themselves a $50 USB capture card and a $20 HDMI cable, and use OBS to capture the feed from the HDMI-out in the camera? Most decent capture cards also expose themselves as cameras to almost all applications. This is my setup, and it works perfectly. Nikon D7500 as a webcam. More professional setups use Atomos monitors with built-in NVMe drives mounted directly to the camera. I generall…
> Is there a reason OP can't get themselves a $50 USB capture card and a $20 HDMI cable, and use OBS to capture the feed? This is how I've used my Sony camera since COVID. It works great. I wasn't sure at first if OP was trying to do something nonstandard, because you get video to your computer with a video cable. Plus a way for your computer to capture that, which for me is CamLink. Honestly, I'm surprised there's a…
OP wants to just use the USB cable, which makes sense for me.
Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you generally don't have everything you need. As I've mentioned most cameras' USB webcam output (if at all present) is quite bad, even via the official programs or gphoto. The 'correct' way to access video output is through their, well, video-out port (usually HDMI), which almost necessitates a capture card or monitor.
Evidently these cameras are capable of exporting high quality video via USB, if you pay 5 bucks a month. This doesn't sound like a hardware problem. It also has a control channel, unlike HDMI.
> these cameras are capable of exporting high quality video via USB
No, they are not. The USB port is (usually) USB 2.0 and the video output, even though the application might claim 1080p 30 FPS, is a 'digital upscale'[1] from XGA or 720p. That in my view is decidedly not 'high quality'. My monitor has eight times that resolution and more than four times the framerate, totalling more than a 32× increase in bandwidth, and it is from 2021.
If users want high-quality video out from their pro cameras, use a capture card or monitor. That's how it's always been. As another commenter said, this article is rage-bait because the OP has purposely chosen a decidedly poorly-supported way to use their camera's functionality instead of the industry standard.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/canon/comments/1e32r51/canon_eos_we...
Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's more like "so you can't drink it" without the taxes part. Those taxes play important role in reducing alcohol consumption (though they are of course not the only tool), so making cheap ethanol poisonous and with different color closes the loophole in healthcare policy rather than opens a loophole in taxation. E.g. study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3860576/
Couldn't they just make it taste bad, for safety's sake?
In some countries it's done so and poisoning is banned. E.g. Finland and Poland got an exemption from the EU to do this because so many people died from the poisonings.