Table of Contents
CamStream works slightly different from other tools. Rather than doing one thing and provide a ton of options to accomplish your task, it uses several applets (here called "Viewers") to perform a specific task. I'll explain using the Open dialog:
Apart from the device selection dropdown box, there is a Viewer selection; in here the available applets are listed. Currently, there is only one viewer fully implemented, the Regular viewer. It implements your basic webcam software functionality and is described in this chapter.
Other viewers will be implemented later; popular requests are a video recorder and a motion detector. One other viewer that is on the TODO-list is a video-conferencing tool. Some viewers will be in beta, or even listed as experimental. Beta viewers may be documented, but experimental viewers never are. All viewers are based on a common framework and share some functionality; it should therefor be easy to develop new viewers.
One of the nice features of the current design is that it is possible to open a device more than once, even with the same viewer. It should therefor be possible to record a movie from a webcam and at the same time take snapshots using the Regular viewer. There are some restrictions, however: all viewers must use the same image size, and (currently) a viewer can have only one configuration stored per device; it is also easy to overtax your CPU this way.