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I have a Canon LEGRIA HF R606 camcoder and I would like to connect it to my computer to stream live videos (e.g. in Google Hangouts or anything else), so basically using it as webcam.

It's not clear to me how to do that.

The camera has an HDMI output, but I guess the laptop doesn't have an HDMI input (or am I wrong? I can connect my laptop to an external monitor using the HDMI output. Can that one be used as input maybe?).

The camera also has an USB cable I use to download the videos to my computer.

I have no idea what setup should I have to have my camcoder working as webcam.

How can I do that?

Ionică Bizău
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1 Answers1

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We can not directly grab a live video signal from a HDMI-out port of a video camera without the help of a hardware video capture device.

These come in a wide variety ranging from full HD HDMI capture devices to low budget (720 x 576 pixels) video converters.

For me a low budged solution (less than € 15,-) based on the Easy CAP DC60 device worked fine. The device comes in various brands (e.g. LogiLink, Mumbi) with the same hardware to be connected to USB2.0 on the computer, and to the AV-out jack of the camcorder.

In the usual case most (but sadly not all) of these devices are recognized out of the box using the qv4l2 kernel driver, which is installed by default.

We can then use any webcam application (e.g. Cheese) capable of adressing the qv4l2 driver. Recordings including audio can be done with VLC.

Takkat
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