Flipping/Reversing the picture - how?

[henryd]

I am developing an application where, for mechanical reasons, the camera has to hang upside down. The video stream is captured via DirectShow. Nothing special there.
The camera itself (Hitachi 454) does not have any command to flip the picture, so I need to reply on the DirectShow software.
DirectShow itself doesn't have a flip function but can access the PropertyPages of the video source.
In the case of EasyCap there is no PropertyPage advertising a flip/reverse picture option.
So, how can I get the driver developers to add such a function?

BTW if anyone is interested I can give you a Visual Studio C# project which demonstrates the problem.

[theothercliff]

EasyCap is a dead product.  That is the only reason there are no Windows 7 64 bit drivers available for the DC60 from the manufacturer.

AMCap does have a flip option, but I don't know if it is a driver property or a program function that does it, and I expect that it is the standard horizontal flip.

If you really need this, look into OpenCV and write your own program.  OpenCV has a huge number of functions and the simple flip, in any direction as I recall, is one of them.  1 or 2 pages of code will get you a flip and a store to disk while you watch it on the monitor.

Good luck.
Cliff

[theothercliff]

Even though the driver has settings called "Flip Horizontal" and "Flip Vertical" it appears that they are not implemented.

I found "Flip Horizontal" and "Flip Vertical" in the installation INF file so I ran regedit, searched for "Flip " (note trailing space and without the quotes), verified that it is one of the correct ones by making sure that the order was "Flip Horizontal", "Flip Vertical" with "Gamma" after it, changed all the flip values from 0 to 1, repeated for all found values in the registry, exited regedit, shutdown, powered off and on.  It still did not flip either way with AMCap.  I verified that the values were still set to 1 after the reboot.  I rebooted again and verified that it did not flip either way by using Windows Explorer preview.

I ran AMCap which has a "Flip Horizontal" in options -> Video Capture Pin.  It did not cause a flip either.  I verified that the "Flip Horizontal" in AMCap indeed changes (at least) one of the "Flip Horizontal" values in the registry from 0 to 1, so I was definitely on the right track.  It appears that these are just not implemented in the driver.

Of course you can do it in software if you can find a package that does it itself, rather than relying on the driver setting.  ...or write your own like I did with OpenCV.

The simple way to do a vertical flip would be to either make a new camera mount or to make a camera mount for your camera mount out of a short piece of square tube (PVC or metal) like from Home Depot.

Cliff