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

Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

romanzipp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 665 posts

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#211

Post by 15155 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #84
School-Cotton wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This vaguely reminds me of the fact that in many countries, pure ethanol sold for industrial purposes is intentionally made poisonous, so you can’t drink it and thus merchants don’t have to charge the taxes on it that they would for spirits.

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/

Every legal allowance I disagree with is a "loophole", every legal allowance I take advantage of is intended functionality.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#212

Post by baxtr »

brushfoot wrote: post #124
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #28

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 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 expects the camera comes with some decent convenience at that price.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#213

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

ErneX wrote: post #115
c120 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

In Spain every device you buy that has some kind of storage is taxed for piracy, the money goes to the local equivalent of the RIIA or book editors associations.

Same in France where the money goes to the local RIAA. Even if it’s a hard drive meant for Linux, or to store public domain stuff. It’s basically a mafia that gets our money despite copying for backup purposes being completely legal.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#214

Post by vr46 »

alibarber wrote: post #20

I 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…

It may have been a customs and taxation issue here, but manufacturers are constantly adding costs of their own onto software before often reversing track.

Examples: Leica (for Fotos) charged a princely sum for various trifles before removing these fees.

Naim: charged £35 for the control app - which I paid - before going free, and now the app is the only way to control whole swathes of their increasingly-execrable hardware.

These two companies’ kit is expensive, luxury, premium, however you want to refer to it, and so they probably felt comfortable wringing their customers a little more. Probably understandable in the case of Leica owners who will pay £250 for a viewfinder dioptre correction lens (puts hand up again) but less so for hifi owners.

It is not that audiophiles haven’t been shown to spent inordinate sums on the dumbest, snakiest, oiliest tat this side of an Oxford Street souvenir shop, but it has to be material and palpable.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#215

Post by [deleted] »

aredox wrote: post #170
jorvi wrote: post #66

Earlier 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.

The very raison-d'être of the EU is to remove all tarriffs between 20+ countries. Without the EU, there would be a worse patchwork of rules and exceptions.

[deleted]

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#216

Post by cynicalsecurity »

The lad is using an Apple computer which is a closed walled garden architecture designed specifically for whales. I'm sorry, but this is an invitation to be fleeced. A loud cry to everyone around to put their hands into your purse and grab some money.

Now you understand why people fight for open source software and use Linux. Join us or keep dealing with the walled garden scams.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#217

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

alibarber wrote: post #20

I 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…

I think the time limit is because of the way the imports are classified.

I believe that under 30 minutes, allows it to be a digicam, but over, requires it to be classified as a video camera.

Most pros generally take scenes as groups of short runs, so that doesn't matter (Canon is used extensively in professional entertainment).

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#218

Post by traverseda »

I know this isn't the point, but here's my nixos script for using a canon DSLR as a webcam

https://codeberg.org/traverseda/nixos-config/src/commit/ee3f...

To get this out of nixos you need to create 4 files

dslrWebcamConfContent goes into your modprobe config

dslrUdevRule goes into your udev rules

dslrWebcamScript goes somewhere, probably /opt

dslrWebcamService is a systemd service.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#219

Post by tiborsaas »

mihaaly wrote: post #50

The penny-fucking behaviour of huge organization in parallel of pushing at you unwanted (actually obstructing) messages in various ways, email, pop-ups and tootip suggestions and advices, CI/CD pushed on the user on a prominent way are repelling. In parallel to the rubbish web presence not working reliably or at all, far from being easy for clients but usually having bells and whistles for distraction. I saved quite…

I thought it's weird to have "fillérbaszó" to have such a direct english counterpart, but then I checked your username :)
Post reply on HN