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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

If you have a mirrorless or DSLR camera lying around, try this first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870161. It might end up saving you money!

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I bought a HDMI->USB video capture card, and tried to use it with my DSLR camera. It works fine in Teams, but not in Zoom. And that's because Teams selects a reasonable capture resolution that matches the 16:9 aspect ratio image produced by my camera's HDMI output at 1080p. Zoom selects the lowest possible resolution, which is 640x480, which makes me look squished. There is no setting in the Zoom interface that lets me change this.

If you haven't, try going into your video settings on Zoom and selecting "Enable HD". This solution has fixed the aspect ratio problem you're describing for my company's customers in almost every case.

No, "Enable HD" does absolutely nothing.

If you're on a Mac you may be able to pipe it through CamTwist. I can add more info if you're interested but would take some work to dig up.

No, Linux. I think I have found out how to use gphoto2 and a direct usb link instead of the capture card, which may fix it, but that'll have to run on my main computer, not my slow laptop.

I'd love to be able to tell the v4l driver for the usb capture card to just not offer the 640*480 resolution. That would fix it in a better way. Anyone have any ideas how to do that?

Are you sure you need a USB capture card? I'm using an EOS M50 and I followed along with this guide: https://www.crackedthecode.co/how-to-use-your-dslr-as-a-webc.... Works pretty well, all FOSS stuff and avoids needing a capture card.

That's ... exactly what I just said. However, the transcoding burden would be a little too much for the Atom in my laptop, so I'd have to do it on my main computer instead.

Regarding the capture card. The aspect ratio mess-up is entirely its fault.

I use a Nikon D610 through a camlink 4k, and then a movo um700 for audio. The camlink 4k firmware has a bug (it reports modes it does not support), so I have a small workaround in place on Linux for that.

Overall quality of everything is very high. Does it save money? I guess I already had the camera.

Is it a good idea to broadcast myself at that level of quality? Probably not ;)

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