Patrick Cooney's Weblog

Webcam

2007-05-30

I bought a cheap web cam at the supermarket on the weekend. After plugging it in I wondered how hard it would be to program. Particularly, I wondered if I could programmatically take pictures with the web cam and send the pictures up to my weblog along with the GPS information that already goes there. I figure so long as I have a database of everywhere I have been, I may as well have a database of what those places look like. And it was a long weekend, and it seemed like a good project for a long weekend...

The easiest way I found to automatically capture images on Windows is to use the API in avicap.dll. capGetDriverDescriptionA lets me enumerate attached devices and return a device name, which I can then pass to capCreateCaptureWindowA to creates a capture window, which I can then hook up to the web camera using a series of windows messages (sample code here and here. Not elegant (why do I need to create a window to capture some video?), but it works.

That's the view from my couch, btw. For the moment I'm storing these in a DB via a SOAP service, but I wonder if there is a nice GPS + photos + google maps mashup in the offing...

Tags: programming

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