AdeW said:
Can anyone run this program: Amcap (USBPCCamPlus). I've had difficulty
getting it to work.
http://download.chinavasion.com/drivers
(Its description is about 2/3rds of the way down this long web page
but you can also find it with the find feature in IE (edit menu > find
- Ctrl+f - and find with keyword usbpc). But here's a direct hyperlink
to the download file anyway...
http://download.chinavasion.com/download/drivers/USBPCCamPlus_v5.18.1.005_120standard(1.3M).exe
I plug in my camera but it says...
"Sorry, you have no video capture hardware"
Does it work for you?
I tested "USBPCCamPlus_v5.18.1.005_120standard(1.3M).exe"
and I can see an INF file "snpstd3.inf" and it has a
bunch of Sonix/Microdia cameras in it. The VEN value
is 0C45 for those. My purpose in including this link,
is to demonstrate there are a large number of cameras
made by that manufacturer, so knowing this,
doesn't narrow down which camera this is. Knowing
both the VEN and the DEV value, narrows it down a bit more.
http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/video4linux/gspca.txt
You can look in "setupapi.log" on your C: partition, for
entries involving 0C45. That would give you some idea,
whether the driver package you installed, was being used
for the new hardware. The VEN and DEV values tell you which
camera it is. Cameras consist of a USB controller chip, plus a sensor chip,
and together they make up the camera.
usb\vid_0c45&pid_xxxx look for "vid_0c45" near the end
of your C:\WINDOWS\setupapi.log file.
The "xxxx" value will be more numbers
for your specific camera.
The camera may have come with instructions, which might suggest
to you to install the software first, then plug in the camera.
The cameras probably come in two types, ones that are UVC compliant
and older cameras where the driver is necessary for the OS to see
them. I suspect your camera needs the driver.
Now, the other place to look, is Device Manager. I just
plugged in my UVC compliant camera, and instantly Windows
recognizes it without any driver. I have an "Imaging Devices"
entry in Device Manager, and underneath that "USB Video Device".
Doing properties on that, gives USB\VID_046D&PID_0990 as
the Device Instance Id, and that is an example of using
the Device Manager to gather the same information. If you had
a non-UVC camera, you'd probably get a yellow mark for the
camera, if no driver was added to the system for its usage.
AMCap is based on sample code originally written by Microsoft.
It is probably looking for some standard software interface,
to find a video device to capture from. I don't know
right off hand, which interface that would be. But at
the very least, you can work on getting the camera
recognized first, and have a working entry for it in
Device Manager.
In Windows, if I go to Settings : Control Panels : Scanners and Cameras,
I can see a single entry in there for "USB Video Device". You
can use that entry, to test captures from your camera. But
again, that assumes your drivers are working. At the moment,
with my UVC compliant camera, it took over 30 seconds,
but eventually the "Scanner and Camera Wizard" is displaying
an image of what my camera is focused on. I can take snapshots
that way. While UVC makes the basic features of the camera
work, it is not the whole story - I need to install the driver
for my camera, in order for it to achieve its highest resolution
setting. So some custom features don't work with UVC alone.
But I can easily take test snapshots, to prove the camera
works.
If you want a program that can read devices on USB ports,
you can use a copy of UVCView for that. The details are in this
blurb I've posted before. (I've located another source for this,
but I still have to test it first.)
*******
ftp://ftp.efo.ru/pub/ftdichip/Utilities/UVCView.x86.exe
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe
File size is 167,232 bytes.
MD5sum is 93244d84d79314898e62d21cecc4ca5e
This is a picture of what the UVCView info looks like.
http://www.die.de/blog/content/binary/usbview.png
Some information on the parameters seen in UVCView.
http://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb5.htm
You should be able to get VEN and DEV info from a plugged
in device. That program will also help you determine whether
the camera is alive at all or not.
*******
Anyway, that may give you some ideas as to how you can prove
the camera isn't completely dead.
(To analyse the download from Chinavasion, I used Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit
running in VPC2007, with Wine 1.2 RC3 installed. Using that,
I was able to run the InstallShield exe, and get to see the files
it installed. By doing that, there was a little less risk to
my current WinXP install. I used Virustotal.com to scan the
download file, and it was clean. But I decided to use Ubuntu
anyway, as a means to insulate my real OS.)
Paul
rograms entry for Amcap.