[SDL] Reading images from WebCam

[Simon]

On 4/12/06, Romulo Gnomo <romulobr at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, I am starting a project wich involves taking pictures of the web-cam and
> analyzing it in realtime (or the most near to it I can get), I would really
> like to use SDL on this project, so here are some questions before I begin:
>
> Is there anyway to get the images from a "windows" web-cam using sdl? If it
> works on linux and mac it better, but not necessary.
>
> Is it a simples/easy way?
>
> What so you think would be the best way to do it? I need speed because
> images will be analyzed in realtime.
>
> Sorry if this is posted twice, I don't know if it worked the last time.
> Thanks in advance.

A friend of mine had started working on a small (pornographic, shhh)
website that was supposed to include webcams for public/private
viewing.  In his design, the webcam just takes a number of shots
(images) and puts them on the disk, his tool then take them from there
and do whatever it wants with the newly created image.  I'll ask him
how he got to make the camera output image files on disk, and it was
on windows, not sure if it would be a portable way of dealing with
webcams.

I'm also interested in webcams, not for building entertainment
websites, but rather for image analysis.  I'm also developping a
device that will gather the distance-to-image from some sort of robot,
applied to the realtime image it could yield a 3D view of what the
robot sees.  Anyway, haven't got a clue how to talk to webcams but
I'll be working on it.  I'll post anything I find here, can you do the
same?

Thanks,
  Simon