QuickCam Pro 9000 Auto-focus with Mac OSX UVC Driver

Hi,

I'm doing some work in Mac OSX with a QuickCam Pro 9000. I am using Apple's QTKit framework to talk to the camera, using the built-in UVC driver in Leopard. Is there any way to disable the auto-exposure feature in OSX? For my application, I need to have high frame-rates, but whenever the ambient lighting level gets too low, the camera increases the exposure, which makes the frame rate drop.

Thanks,
Nick Forge

(BTW, it would be great to have a separate Mac OS X sub-forum)

As of today we have a separate Mac OS forum, so I've moved your thread there. :-)

Great, thanks!

BTW just to clarify, I meant "Auto-exposure", not "Auto-focus" as is written in the subject line.

This post was last modified: 2008-04-27 21:38 by seldon.

To answer to your original question: I don't know whether the Apple UVC driver lets you access the device properties directly or not. In theory it should and that shouldn't be a Logitech-specific feature. Have you checked their documentation?

Any updates on this?

I am looking to manually control the focus, exposure, and white balance for a cross-platform application I am developing. It works well on windows where the QuickCam "change settings" button gives me access to those controls, but everything I've tried (quickcam 8.01, macam, ichat, skype, etc.) on the mac (10.4.11) doesn't allow me to make manual adjustments.

Also, I'm wondering if Macam may be a solution (since it does have some of the manual override functionality in its latest versions); but it does not see the UVC Logitech webcams I try (QC pro for Notebooks and QC Vision Pro) presumably because they are already consumed by the UVC mac driver. Is there anyway to disable the UVC default driver to allow Macam to see the webcams and enable manual control?

As it has been mentioned in the other forums, I'm a bit surprised that a port of the QuickCam windows application (at least the settings control) hasn't been ported to mac recently.

Any ideas would be great. I think a lot of people would benefit from finding a solution to this problem.

Thanks,
Adam

kumpf@mit.edu

More info can be found in my previous post over in the general discussion webcam forum.
http://forums.logitech.com/logitech/boar...d.id=16322

It might not exactly be what you are looking for, but in QuickTime Broadcaster there are some very basic controls, in the Video tab (and then Source and Options): saturation, brightnes, contrast and sharpness (but I haven't tried if it really works); I guess that they are simply part of the QuickTime (Pro) framework, so to say.

Sadly, that seems to be all, at this point, on Mac OS X: it's really sad that there aren't other free alternatives and that macam doesn't work in this case (don't know how to fix this); there is also an application called iGlasses, but it's not free (anyway, a demo download is available); some video conference apps such as aMSN are also able to access the settings I described before, but they are indeed quite basic (no manual focus adjustment, for example).

If a new full-featured Logitech QuickCam software (as in the past on the Mac and today only in Windows) or a port of guvcview were available on Mac OS X, of course it would be much better...

Edit: You could also try the so-called iSight Disabler script (of course entirely at your own risk): maybe this could permit macam to see the QuickCam - who knows...

This post was last modified: 2008-11-25 01:57 by SvenG.

ditto. i have this exact problem, though with a quickcam e3500 plus that otherwise works nicely in osX. if i blast light on my image, or place my hand really close to the lense, the exposure changes and the framerate is great. but without tons of light, the framerate drops and things get blurry. :'( funny thing is, first time i plugged this camera in to my mac, it worked super well, though the image was dark. i simply applied light to the scene as needed, and the framerate stayed topped. then, after a reset, suddenly the camera showed up as a Logitech Camera (instead of an Unknown Device) and started serving its own *intelligent* needs when it came to auto-exposure. funny stuff.

anyone have any glory with this issue? about to try to two suggestions below, but it'd really be great if there was some plist or something we could edit to change UVC settings. *crosses fingers*