Capturing video (or at least one frame) inside Rev

[Ben Rubinstein]

on 16/5/02 1:56 PM, sims at sims at ezpzapps.com wrote:

>> This has to work in the background, without doing anything on the screen.
> 
> Do you mean that it has to happen while the movie is running?
> 
> Have you looked at HackTV from the Apple web site?


on 16/5/02 4:33 PM, Karl Petersen at karlpet at mac.com wrote:

>> Given a QuickTime-recognised video source, is there a built-in way in Rev to
>> capture a frame and save it out as a file, named under program control?
> 
> This will capture any portion of the stack window:
> import snapshot from rect <playerRect> of window <yourWindowID>


Thanks both for your replies.  I think I wasn't as clear in my initial
request as I might have been.  The situation is that I'll have a source of
video (actually a live camera); but I do not wish to display it on screen at
all.  In response to some event that Revolution can trap, I want my Rev app
to invisibly save a file to disk representing a frame grabbed from this
source - meanwhile the screen is displaying something quite different.  At
no point should the live video feed appear on the screen (the image from the
file will be manipulated and a manipulated version will be displayed at some
other point in the process).

In my ideal world there'd be a sequence grabber component in Rev that could
go into an offscreen or hidden control, from which I could extract the image
data.  There is a record sound command - what about a record video command?
Or an external which can just be used to retrieve a frame from the given
source?

Or potentially (but less neatly) an app running in the background, which
could be invisibly instructed to save the image, would do the job.  I'll try
to dig up Hack TV and see if it can fill this role.

(I may have some control over the camera used as the soure - I'm also
currently looking at webcams sold with embedded servers, with the thought
that this could be networked to the computer, and using "get URL" to
retrieve a jpg.  But I'd rather have a higher quality image than I suspect
these are typically configured to deliver.)

Anyone know of an external that can do something like this?

TIA,
 
  Ben Rubinstein               |  Email: benr_mc at cogapp.com
  Cognitive Applications Ltd   |  Phone: +44 (0)1273-821600
  http://www.cogapp.com        |  Fax  : +44 (0)1273-728866