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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

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your camera is compatible with magiclantern you could lift that limit and add some really cool features: https://www.magiclantern.fm/

I’ve come across this before and think it’s brilliant. Are you aware of any comparable firmware for Nikon users (not that I really have any complaints about what Nikon has provided, but this is likely a case of not knowing what I’m missing out on)?

I'm not, and that's the reason why I went Canon. There is also CHDK for cheaper Canon cameras. Canon seems to be less litigous when it comes to hacking their firmware.

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

#554
I purchased a Canon M50 to use as a webcam during covid. I spend a lot of time doing remote training and quality video is paramount to me. At that time, the Canon webcam software worked fine on my Windows machine.

I later moved back to a Mac as my daily driver and the Canon software was never reliable on m1 chips. The camera didn't have clean HDMI out. I was pretty frustrated because my fancy webcam no longer worked. Canon showed little desire to support Macs.

I purchased a used Sony that had clean HDMI and it worked great with a cheap HDMI capture device.

I now use an Insta360 webcam with a large sensor. Image quality and focus speed are great. It has slightly less bokeh effect than the Canon and Sony, but folks always comment about how good my video looks.

They are also quite a bit cheaper than going the DSLR route for webcam.

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

#555
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 :)

; )

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

#556
post #240
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 an…

> 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.

So true! So sad!

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

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure. Like how color printers write their serial numbers and date and whatnot on every page, these devices might be watermarking every video subtly, and we might not know it.

It’s not exactly watermarking; each encoder works in a different way and it’s readily possible to determine (for one versed in such matters) which encoder was used to generate a video by inspecting the structure of the raw (eg h264) bitstream. This might not work reliably enough for simpler codecs like JPEG but for something as complicated as modern video codec where there are a million ways to generate a compatible…

That’s true, but I thought of embedding a serial number and a date into the video, periodically, for example, which can be quantized as noise, but not very visible unless you filter the frame a very specific way, or pass through a tool.

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

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in the end it didn't save them anything, because the EC didn't accept that having a toy basic interpreter made what was obviously a games console a PC. I can't imagine it was terribly expensive in the scheme of things, though.

If it can run a desktop linux environment it's a PC. That said it probably should only count if the preinstalled software is Linux and not some games OS.

I would say that a PC should be compatible with the software and hardware of the IBM 5150.

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

#559
post #68

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…

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...

> Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human

Isn't that true though?

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

#560

That's reminds me when I was in South East Asia a few years back and wanted to do some time lapse or series photography with my Sony Alpha a7ii. A camera that I had paid close to 2k€ for (just body, no glass). It required an app to be installed on the camera that was paid-for. Which in term required the camera to be connected to a WiFi. Imagine discovering this while on a trip in the jungle or the desert or whatever…

Ha. That made me laugh.
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