Article Preview
Buy Now
REVIEW
BESTCapture Plugin
Issue: 2.2 (October/November 2003)
Author: Michael Richardson
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,186
Starting Page Number: 8
Article Number: 2203
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.bestsoftwaredesign.com
Excerpt of article text...
Countless programs have been created in REALbasic since its inception in 1996. No doubt, at least one person has created, or wanted to create, a program involving video capture. BEST Software Design's BESTCapture plug-in promises to let your programs easily support video capture.
The first thing I did after downloading the archive was, of course, install the plugin and check out the example. It was surprising to find that the plugin worked in REALbasic 5.2, as well as older versions all the way back to REALbasic 3.2.1 (although the example file did not run in older versions due to some syntax that is only in newer versions). Continuing to test using RB 5.2, one thing I noticed right off the bat in Mac OS 9 is that this plugin really bogs down the computer when it's operating. It took several seconds just to open menus and do other trivial things, even on an iMac G4 700 MHz. Mac OS X, of course, did not suffer from this problem, but it is a problem if you still create software for OS 9.
Regardless, there was still a picture in that example window, and it worked with both cameras I tried: the PC Camera feature of a Finepix 3800, and an older QuickCam VC (which only works in OS 9 due to driver issues). The plugin delivered basically the same quality as any other program with video capture.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.