AMCap grabs an AVI stream. That does not seem to be what you need. There is a sample 'stillcap' in the 'editing' folder for DirectShow that gives single frames as BMP files. How about this?
Hello James,
Thanx for the suggestion about Stillcap.
StillCap documentation and source code comments do make some reference to "spying" on the camera activity. I will have to study this a bit. Do you have any idea how a Mach3 plugin would fetch a bitmap snapshot from a program similar to (i.e. with some necessary modifications) StillCap?
Or maybe how to modify StillCap to actually be a Mach plugin?
Some of the bells and whistles in AmCap are not in StillCap. This will be a problem for the 3d Video Probe.
For example, it is essential that the AGC be set for short enough time that the camera sees nothing but the laser. It is also necessary that the laser not saturate the video but otherwise comes close to saturating. This involves setting the AGC to manage the exposure time according to the peak detected or for the user to manually set the exposure to a brief period (e.g. 1ms).
A few other features will be needed fairly soon into the development. Some of these would be the ability to rotate the image at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees and possibly to mirror the image. This can be done after the image is captured but there may be driver settings that will handle that for me.
Tom Hubin
thubin@earthlink.net