Friday, March 22, 2013

How to use a GOPRO Hero 3 Black edition as a webcam

Ever since I got this camera I was wondering if one could use it as a webcam.

Well you can, I figured it out.

You need Manycam, VLC media player and Wigo

Manycam only supports mjpeg streams but the gopro streams in h.264 so it cannot naively connect to the camera, hence why vlc is needed to transcode and re-stream the video.
Note, the video stream is 432x240 so not very high resolution.
Also, there is about 3-4 seconds latency.. to be expected with WiFi and transcoding in the pipeline..

In case you do not want to write out the URLs in VLC and Manycam:

http://10.5.5.9:8080/live/amba.m3u8
http://127.0.0.1:8080/go.mjpg

This playlist has the instructions as well as a few tests.




Have fun! Now you can Skype people from the shower hahahaha :D
(or pool in your back yard... etc)
Any application that uses a webcam could take advantage of this, such as ustream, chattroulette, Facebook video messaging...


I use virtual audio cable
http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.htm
And set the output device on vlc to that instead of my speakers, since manycam doesnt seem to support using the audio stream from vlc/the gopro

What I really need is to be able to connect to h.264 streams in manycam with audio.
Hopefully enough people will like this so that they add the feature, and there's quite a bit  of desire for a phone app as well.

Here are a few sample videos I've taken with the camera.. imagine the applications! You could use a gopro to have a google+ hangout while diving, or ustream from a wireless portable camera..






Thursday, February 7, 2013

January 2013 temperatures vs average and rainstorm

It was very warm for about 24 hours and poured rain before becoming cold again on the last 2 days of January . see the photos and the temperature chart for this month :D
Data is from climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca St Anicet QC weather station (also used for Cornwall Ontario.)
For captions and higher resolutions see:
https://plus.google.com/photos/101803917570729258243/albums/5842164620796131809







Thursday, January 3, 2013

I miss skype..

You know Microsoft, it was nice when skype worked... when it didn't memory leak to 800+ MB of usage while eating a cpu core on battery..

When you didn't have to pay for multi videochat..

I guess you have to make your purchase price worth it for investors, but why can't you use that as an excuse to dedicate a competent dev team to make it actually work properly?

IF you did this I might even consider paying real money for it again, yknow, i purchased service via paypal from skype several years before you bought them..

**UPDATE
(pix)
WTF SKYPE