Question

I’ve built an AIR application with flash/as3 that has a webcam display on the stage. While building the app, and in all my tests everything looks and works just dandy, but when I publish for AIR the image gets stretched. The bounds of the image seem to stay the same, but the actual cam output is what’s distorted. Has anyone come into this problem before?

I should add, this is a desktop app, which is permanently installed on one machine, so device compatibility should not be an issue.

this is the camera setup:

    var cam:Camera = Camera.getCamera();
    cam.setMode(280,380,20);
    var video:Video = new Video(380,380);

this is where i first call the camera…

    video.attachCamera(cam);
    video.x = 355;
    video.scaleX = -1;
    video.y = -100;
    addChildAt(video, 0);

the reason for the odd sizing, is that it sits behind a frame, that changes positions throughout the interactive.

Answer 1

Not necessarily the answer you are looking for, but you should keep this in mind:

You are asking the camera to capture at the resolution of 280 x 380, which is not a standard 4:3 aspect ratio.

When you call cam.setMode(280,380,20); the docs say that Flash will try to set the cameras resolution to your specifications, and if the camera does not support that resolution it will try to find one that matches. So you may or may not be getting this actual resolution.

setMode() has a fourth parameter, which can disable this functionality. Read the docs on that so you understand the implications 🙂

Then you display the video in a Video object that is 380×380. So I would expect the image to be stretched in the horizontal direction (b/c the original source is only 280).

It’s not clear why this behaves differently: are you saying that running the debug version of the app works, but when you export the release build and run that it looks funky?

Finally, what is scaleX = -1 doing? I recall this as some sort of nifty trick I used in the past… but it’s purpose here is escaping me 🙂