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Comment by dgorges | Hacker News Reader

> The camera sends the image used for Live View - the dimensions will not match the camera's movie recording settings.

This sounds like a bummer. I want to try this anyways to give my old Powershot a new purpose.

Did anybody check this out yet?

The Elgato Cam Link is worth checking out if you're serious about this - it's an HDMI video capture device which presents itself on the computer end as a UVC compatible USB webcam and will accept the HDMI streams DSLRs usually send. They're expensive though.

There are other similar devices on the market too but not sure how good they are for this situation.

They're all bought out by price gougers. I've been trying to get one for two months but won't pay $400 for one.

If you’re using a PC, I bought the PCIe version of the camlink from Best Buy a few weeks ago without any problems (they even have it in stock).

Even before that they weren't cheap though. The RRP for the camlink 4k is USD129 I think - more expensive than a typical 1080p webcam.

$129 is fine with me. The quality you get out of a DSLR is really good.

I’ve entered that phase in my cycle where I’d rather buy separate pieces that are good quality and put them together.

Elgato sells other capture cards (eg. HD60), which still seem available.

I recently bought a raspberry pi hi quality camera (and lens) to tinker with, and was able to connect it to my mac via pi->hdmi->capture-card to make a nice webcam view with the bokeh effect.

the total cost of this example does add up, but still cheaper than a DSLR setup.

Can you share more about this? What’s a capture card? And how did the latency turn out?

I’m interested!

capture cards are devices primarily intended for game streamers to give your computer an hdmi input to stream/record games from a game console, but are also useful for other purposes such as turning your dslr into an expensive webcam.

i have this one: https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/game-capture-hd60-s-plus

you can find others from magewell

i don't have measurements but the latency was indistinguishable from a directly connected webcam.

If you use the usb gadget mode of the raspberry pi to present the PI as a USB WebCam, you can forego the HDMI-connection, and thus the need for the HDMI capture card.

I've been trying to get a FPV drone camera feed into my Windows 10 computer so OpenCV can muck around with it.

OpenCV easily recognizes Webcams, but sucks at picking up 'video adapter' kinda stuff. (That is, I'm going to be using an RCA to USB dongle, such as EasyCap.)

If you can 'trick' OpenCV into thinking a webcam is attached at the USB, everything is golden.

Can you describe this raspberry pi method of 'presenting' the device as a USB WebCam? That sounds promising...

edit: Forgot to mention OpenCV is part of a c++ 64bit program I'm writing.

here's a couple of links discussing how to set up and working through the issues.

http://www.davidhunt.ie/raspberry-pi-zero-with-pi-camera-as-...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=148361

You can also use Canon or Sony's camera software and window capture it in OBS.

I used it for a few calls but the latency was too high for me personally. I work remotely so I'm interested in the DSLR DoF for video calls, but it seems the best is still a Capture card.

I use it with a T6s, along with CamTwist. It looks like it's bad latency and resolution initially but but you have to open the Preferences in CamTwist and increase FPS to 30 and size to 1920x1080.

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