the picture does not match the webcam image

[Christophe de Carvalho]

When I take a photo, sometimes the picture does not match the webcam image.
Here is the result of this bug : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5278532/bug_photostory.png

[Art (vand3lay)]

That's probably just because it takes the photo slightly before/after the countdown finishes.

Unless you mean that vertical split about 4/5th down the image, and that horizontal one near the top I have no idea why that's happening. I am experiencing it too, only my images are split closer to the middle, and when I go to ~/.photostory/photos and open the photo with any viewer the split is still in it. It also appears consistently in the same location and does not occur with other webcam apps such as cheese.

[Joel Auterson (joel-auterson)]

This is very odd. Please bear with me while I try and get this working...

[Christophe de Carvalho (christophe-dcpm)]

I applied the patch from Joel Dimbernat (https://bugs.launchpad.net/photostory/+bug/723370/comments/6) is it possible that it influence the capture?

[Joel Auterson (joel-auterson)]

I'm not sure. I think it fixes the 0 byte filesize only. Try it and see.

[Joel Dimbernat (joel-dimbernat-gmail)]

This bug affects me too, but I don't think my patch or photostory is responsible...

try
gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=640,height=480 ! capsfilter ! ffmpegcolorspace ! pngenc ! filesink location=foo.png
in the terminal, and check (through many tries) if it happens to you.

It happens for me, so the problem is not from photostory, but more in the camera or gstreamer.
If you manage to reproduce it too through the command line, I suggest you to report the bug to the gstreamer team.

[Art (vand3lay)]

I tried the command that Joel posted, I noticed it took a perfect picture the first time I ran it, but all subsequent pictures were bad. I also noticed that cheese which is also based on gstreamer still takes good pictures no matter what, but it also takes them as jpgs instead, maybe the problem is in the pngenc? How can I run the same command to test this, I tried changing pngenc to jpgenc and jpegenc but it didn't work.

[Joel Dimbernat (joel-dimbernat-gmail)]

Thanks for the idea of jpg, Art!

I managed to make it work more reliably with
gst-launch-0.10 v4l2src num-buffers=1 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=640,height=480 ! jpegenc ! filesink location=foo.jpg

I'll look into changing the pipeline to write jpg instead of png soon.

[Joel Auterson (joel-auterson)]

This is going to require all the user's photos to be converted from
PNG to JPG if we put it into a full release...a better idea might be
to file a bug with GST itself?

[Joel Dimbernat (joel-dimbernat-gmail)]

I agree about filing the bug to Gstreamer. That's the definitive solution.

But till it's solved and released, would it really be necessary to convert the PNGs?
Obviously, the main problem would come from the video envoding, but wouldn't it be possible to deal with it?