Webcam Background

From Performous

Webcam background is a feature available on some platforms, at least on Ubuntu (but not necessarily in all packages) and Windows, from 0.6.0 release onwards. It displays video from a webcam (or other supported capture device) as a replacement for music videos or other kinds of song backgrounds.

The feature is automatically enabled if a webcam is found. It can be toggled with key-combo Ctrl + A or from the configuration menu (where you can also choose the device if you have many).

Troubleshooting

• The video is laggy / slow frame rate
  • Find some kind of control panel for your webcam and check that there isn't any computationally expensive post-processing or otherwise time consuming features enabled. E.g. on Ubuntu I installed guvcview and used it to disable auto-exposure, which gave native frame rate, though at the expense of poorer lighting (which in turn is fixed by adding light to the room).
• The quality of the output is poor / resolution is crappy / lots of artefacts in the image
  • Currently there is no way to change settings through Performous without touching the source code. The webcam is opened with the default settings, which are probably something like 640x480x30. If you feel adventurous, check the OpenCV API reference and look into webcam.cc in Performous source tree.
• Game crashes when starting a song, even if I don't have a webcam connected
  • Disable the webcam background from the config menu.