saliences.com : Webln

A long needed update to the DSGrab applet is available. The biggest change for v1.5.0 is that it now supports YU* colour modes for capture devices, which should make the program a lot more compatible. I’ve also made it a little more user friendly by having the applet choose sensible defaults wherever possible (and removed some questionable options like choice of colour bit depth). The update fixes the following issues which are outlined on the GitHub project page:

• Issue #1: Implement YUV -> RGB filtering
• Issue #2: (Programmer’s Pride): Release AM_MEDIA_TYPE structures
• Issue #3: Use Boost for Command Line parsing
• Issue #4: More intelligent device selection
• Issue #5: (Programmer’s Pride): Uninitialize GdiPlus when finished
• Issue #6: Always default to 24-bit colour depth.

Project Page GitHub Page Direct Source Code download Direct Executable download (may require VS 2010 SP1 run-time)

Enjoy.

I have added a little Utility that I wrote a while back to capture images from compliant DirectShow devices to the web-site called DSGrab. Written in pure C++ (with a little bit of help from the Boost and DirectX SDK), the program will capture an image from the device specified on the command line to an output file on the hard drive. You can use this utility, the Windows Task Scheduler, and a Watermarking script to create a zero-overhead Live Web Cam on your web-site.

There are plenty of utilities on-line that will perform the same workflow, but they always insist on using their own Scheduler and Watermarking code which means a bloated program (some of these downloads are upwards of 5 MB for such a simple task) that needs to be constantly running to perform the function. DSGrab will never abuse system resources since it only ever gets invoked when it needs to capture the picture. DSGrab needs more work to setup, so it is decidedly targeted as a different market, but what you gain is extreme flexibility.

Best of all? It is open source under the MIT License.