Question

I do not really know much in regard to Flash or Action Scripts but I have been having a bit of trouble with AS3 and webcams. I have a script that connects to a webcam and then sends its output to a php script that saves the captured image. This works all except for one problem. It seems that the maximum resolution allowed for the actual Camera object is 320×240. I went to the extreme of hooking a Canon 60D up as a webcam because I have a normal webcam that is supposed to have max resolution of 1280×720 and all I can get is a 320×240 image from it. What I have found so far is the max I can get out of the Canon is also 320×240. Maybe I have been looking at this to long but I am stumped. Below is a sample of the action script where videoCapture should be 1024×768. What happens instead is a 1024×768 image is created with a black background and in the top left is a 320×240 image from videoCapture. I could obviously resize this but that would defeat the purpose being poor quality. Is there something I am missing here or maybe some limitation of Flash even?

// adds event listener to the stage for keydown events.
stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, detectEnterKey);

import flash.display.Bitmap;
import flash.display.BitmapData;
import com.adobe.images.JPGEncoder;
import flash.ui.Keyboard;
import flash.events.KeyboardEvent;

var bandwidth:int = 0;
var quality:int = 100; 

var cam:Camera = Camera.getCamera();

var videoCapture:Video = new Video();

var previewPortData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(1024, 768, true, 0x00000000);
var previewPort:Bitmap = new Bitmap(previewPortData);

function onCameraStatus(evt):void {
  if (evt.code == "Camera.Muted") {
    Security.showSettings(SecurityPanel.CAMERA);
  }
}

// detects the keycode looking for enter key pressed.
function detectEnterKey(event:KeyboardEvent):void {
  //trace("keycode: "+event.keyCode);
  if (event.keyCode == Keyboard.ENTER) {
    previewPortData.draw(videoCapture);
    var myEncoder:JPGEncoder = new JPGEncoder(100);
    var byteArray:ByteArray = myEncoder.encode(previewPortData);
    var header:URLRequestHeader = new URLRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/octet-stream");
    var saveJPG:URLRequest = new URLRequest("save.php");
    saveJPG.requestHeaders.push(header);
    saveJPG.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
    saveJPG.data = byteArray;
    var urlLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
    urlLoader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, sendComplete);
    urlLoader.load(saveJPG);

    function sendComplete(event:Event):void {
      trace("compete");
    }   
  }
}

if (cam == null) {

  Security.showSettings(SecurityPanel.CAMERA);

} else {

  cam.addEventListener(StatusEvent.STATUS, onCameraStatus)
  cam.setQuality(bandwidth, quality);
  cam.setMode(1024, 768, 30, false);

  videoCapture.attachCamera(cam);
  videoCapture.width = 1024;
  videoCapture.height = 768;
  addChild(videoCapture);

  previewPort.x = 430;
  previewPort.y = 50;
  addChild(previewPort);

}

Answer 1

I also just had this problem. Solved it by including the width and height parameters when creating the Video object instead of setting them afterwards via Video.height and Video.width. Once i did that, all bitmapData taken from that video was correctly sized.

This is how i originally created the video that did not work (looked fine, but resulted in incorrectly sized bitmaps):

var vid = new Video();
vid.width = 640;
vid.height = 480;
...

This worked (bitmaps from this video were correctly sized):

var vid = new Video(640, 480);
...

Would love to know why the first way doesn’t work. Maybe that’s the bug mentioned above. (I didn’t have access to that site so couldn’t see it.)