Alternative software like AMCAP for getting video from USB cam

[cowasaki]

AMCAP works with the USB camera on my microscope but are there any alternatives out there?  I have the Adobe Cloud suite but none of the packages seem to work with USB cameras.  What are other people using?

Thanks

[JohnnyMalaria]

OBS Studio?

[NiHaoMike]

A pretty long list:
https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Webcam_Related_Software

[oPossum]

VLC

[Benta]

VLC

+1

[Berni]

I actually use this odd one:
https://www.e-consystems.com/e-CAMView-Windows-camera-streaming-app.asp#Features (Web page is anoying on not just giving you a download tho)

It's actually a demo app for the cameras they make, but in reality its basically the same thing as AMCAP and works with anything detected as a camera on windows. Appears to do a minimal amount of buffering and works fast even when displaying absurd resolution video from fancy USB3 cameras.

[cowasaki]

I actually use this odd one:
https://www.e-consystems.com/e-CAMView-Windows-camera-streaming-app.asp#Features (Web page is anoying on not just giving you a download tho)

It's actually a demo app for the cameras they make, but in reality its basically the same thing as AMCAP and works with anything detected as a camera on windows. Appears to do a minimal amount of buffering and works fast even when displaying absurd resolution video from fancy USB3 cameras.

This looks like it might be ideal.  I will take a look when I get into my workshop later.  Thanks

[cowasaki]

VLC

+1

VLC?  For watching what is effectively a web cam?  I didn't know it did that.

[cowasaki]

A pretty long list:
https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Webcam_Related_Software

Thanks but I'm running Windows

[cowasaki]

VLC

+1

VLC?  For watching what is effectively a web cam?  I didn't know it did that.

OK VLC does it.  I will have to work out what options I need for everything as the default has worse video than amcap

[cowasaki]

I actually use this odd one:
https://www.e-consystems.com/e-CAMView-Windows-camera-streaming-app.asp#Features (Web page is anoying on not just giving you a download tho)

It's actually a demo app for the cameras they make, but in reality its basically the same thing as AMCAP and works with anything detected as a camera on windows. Appears to do a minimal amount of buffering and works fast even when displaying absurd resolution video from fancy USB3 cameras.

This looks like it might be ideal.  I will take a look when I get into my workshop later.  Thanks

I cant download it as it requires registration but doesn't accept details.


EDIT: It wouldn't accept any legit email addresses but did accept bob.dylan@ici.com

Now downloading

[cowasaki]

OK so e-cam-view works as well as AMCAP with a good quality output.  VLC does work but in trying to be clever with dozens of options falls over on not offering a fully default option.  As such it is displaying an out of focus 4:3 image rather than the correct image.  As e-cam-view just works I will use that rather than spend however long it takes going through all the options with codecs etc just to find the correct one that AMCAP and e-cam-view detected and worked with

Thanks everyone.  That was really helpful

[cdev]

On Linux I've yet to find an optimal scientific image capture package.

For people using Linux, maybe imagej (which I remember as very old) or in the case of astronomy images, wxastrocam?

I'd really love to have a still and video capture program that was well suited to doing on screen measurements.

[cowasaki]

On Linux I've yet to find an optimal scientific image capture package.

For people using Linux, maybe imagej (which I remember as very old) or in the case of astronomy images, wxastrocam?

I'd really love to have a still and video capture program that was well suited to doing on screen measurements.

I know VLC is available on linux so maybe that's the way to go.  I couldn't be bothered messing around with a dozen settings just to get the default image as comes out of the camera so I went with the other one which is fine. 

[cdev]

VLC works fine for video capture alone. So does obs.

[ve7xen]

On Linux I've yet to find an optimal scientific image capture package.

For people using Linux, maybe imagej (which I remember as very old) or in the case of astronomy images, wxastrocam?

I'd really love to have a still and video capture program that was well suited to doing on screen measurements.

ImageJ feels old in its quirky design, but it's still getting updated (last Dec 2020) and is quite powerful. I kind of like it. I end up using it fairly often to pull missing dimensions from datasheets / CAD drawings. Doesn't support realtime video, though, which would be a really nice addition.