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

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

#231

Post by jampekka »

amelius wrote: post #183
jampekka wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where can I read more about this? What poison were they using?

It was specifically about methanol. Methanol wasn't explicitly used as a denaturation agent but ethanol methanol mixture sales were (forced to be) allowed. Can't find much in English but here's a brief story.

Methanol sales were banned in Finland prior to EU and Finland applied for the exemption already in the EU application in the early 1990s. It was finally granted in 2019. Probably around 500 people died and many got blinded meanwhile.

https://yle.fi/a/3-7841018

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

#232

Post by beAbU »

amelius wrote: post #91
ivan_gammel wrote: post #84

Earlier 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?

Addiction is one helluva motivator, and some people will put up with horrible tasting stuff as long as it's a cheap high.

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

#233

Post by Joker_vD »

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #213
ErneX wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if the artists see any share of that money...

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

#234

Post by brushfoot »

tjoff wrote: post #227
brushfoot wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

The right too for the job most certainly is not HDMI. The video feed should (depending on usecase, sure) be compressed on the device and sent over USB. Sending uncompressed video just to be badly compressed in a capture device is most definitely not the right tool for the job.

On these cameras, HDMI is the right tool for the job. USB video quality is often poor where it's supported, and HDMI is there for video output.

These cameras are not made to be webcams. OP is using theirs as one, and that's fine; I do too. But device-side compression for USB video out, a webcam app, etc. are webcam features. They come at a cost, and many camera buyers don't need them.

For those of us using these cameras in these nonstandard ways, we can reach for HDMI, which is the right tool for this particular job.

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

#235

Post by sbarre »

josephg wrote: post #156
frognumber wrote: post #113

I firmly believe this is the branch digital cameras are dying on, and at this point, probably must die on. If these opened up, at least to the level iPhone did in 2007, they'd have an ecosystem as people still used them. As-is, for most purposes, my Android phone is a better camera than my full frame interchangeable lens camera.

I think I disagree on every point you've raised here. First, my sony camera (and all sony cameras released in the last ~3+ years) support USB video streaming out of the box, with no drivers. I suspect other brands are the same. It looks like canon is just stuck in the dark ages on this one. They also support remote camera control over USB, and all sorts of other things. Mostly - but not entirely - in an open ecosyste…

> I suspect other brands are the same.

My research shows Sony is the outlier here. Fuji, Canon, Nikon and Panasonic all require software or drivers to be used as a USB camera (or at least did as of a year ago or so).

Also, the camera control software these companies put out, for a computer or a phone, is almost always awful.

Buggy, slow, unreliable.. It's a real problem.

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

#236

Post by dspillett »

brushfoot wrote: post #207
dspillett wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are entirely ignoring the subscription for what should, at most, be a one-off cost. > The app is part of the implementation Give other cameras can do it, there has a standard for it since 2003, and there are F/OSS implementations for others, maybe I'm asking the wrong question and instead should have asked “why should the OP pay a subscription for their bad choice of how to implement the feature?”.

The company can charge whatever they want for this feature. Most people who can afford to use a good camera as their webcam will never use it, because they know the quality is worse and they'd rather use industry-standard HDMI. If I asked Sony for a power generator to charge my camera's battery, they could charge me a million a month if they'd like. Hopefully that would signal to me that there are better and more sta…

> The company can charge whatever they want for this feature.

They can. But that doesn't mean everyone is forced to be happy about it, and doesn't mean it can't be talked about so other people who might not be happy about it can use the information to chose a different camera from a different manufacturer instead of discovering the issue post-purchase.

> they'd rather use industry-standard HDMI

Or the industry standards for video-over-USB, that this manufacturer chose not to implement because they couldn't easily gouge a subscription out of it.

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

#237

Post by hulitu »

rsynnott wrote: post #151
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.

More or less all tariffs and sales tax systems are like this; the rules are _always_ kind of all over the place. My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/irish-court-ru... (Bread had advantageous treatment for VAT purposes, but Subway's 'bread' has too much sugar to qualify.) There's also the famous Jaffa Ca…

> My personal favourite example is when the Irish Supreme Court determined that Subway bread was not bread

Because it is not. Cola is not water either.

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

#239

Post by bayindirh »

Springtime wrote: post #210
bayindirh wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Below a selection of some user manuals, with the texts copied verbatim. From Nikon D500 User Manual [0], page 22: From Nikon Z6/Z7 User Manual [1], page 236: Sony has a similar note for A9 [3], but can be grouped under here, which is almost the same: AVC Patent Portfolio License: THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON - COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (i) E…

Thanks. Yeah that seems to be the same AVC/h.264 'personal and non-commercial' text the 2010 article I linked centered on. MPEG-LA spoke to Engadget[1] (finally found a working link I could read) and said that a separate license for shooting commerical video isn't required and that distribution of commercial content via licensed providers (Google/Youtube, Apple, etc) is fine. It seems the one caveat, per the Engadget…

I looked around VIA-LA (which acquired MPEG-LA in 2023), and I can't see any free licenses about H.264. "Request a license" gives you an e-mail address, and that's it.

There are other license models, which is about manufacturers, publishers and TV stations, etc.

But nowhere it says "there's a free license for these cases, just get it from here".

This all looks like a rabbit hole for me.

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

#240

Post by jwr »

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…

The thing is, nobody cares.

As long as consumers keep making uneducated choices and companies keep copying one another, that's what we will be getting, and honestly, that's what we deserve.

After all, people watch "reviews" of video gear on YouTube (pretty much all "reviewers" get the gear for free and then pretend they are objective). These "reviewers" use the gear for all of several hours before making the video and forgetting about the gear. But that's what people base their buying decisions on.

And then, "competition" doesn't exist, because companies seem to be hell-bent on copying one another's idiotic ideas. Everybody is afraid to take a bolder step and make something different because, you know, next quarter's profits, and bonuses.

So, nobody cares.

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