Introduction

Booru Webcam 2.0 will help you capture images from your webcam. The images can easily be published on your own homepage, archived locally on your harddrive or stored on the Internet. The goal of Booru Webcam is to increase the fun and usefulness of your web cameras.

How to read this manual

For usage instructions, the sections are best read sequentially from Install/Uninstall and forward. The sections are ordered to be as helpful as possible when guiding you through your first-time setup. The features and changes sections are informative regarding the capabilities of Booru Webcam.

Features

The main features of Booru Webcam are:

Save images to files as GIF, JPEG, BMP, TIFF or PNG
Publish images on your homepage
Make advanced text overlays
Use image overlays with transparency
Configure all settings with a new user interface
Flexibly archive the grabbed images

Install/Uninstall

You do not need to install Booru Webcam 2.0. It is simply enough to copy the distributed files to your preferred folder. Booru Webcam will store its settings as files in the same directory as it is started from.

Uninstallation of Booru Webcam is done by removing the files you copied from the distribution plus removing any setting-files that are created in the same folder.

Note that Booru Webcam requires the Microsoft GDI+ to be installed to work properly. The GDI+ component can be downloaded from

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6a63ab9c-df12-4d41-933c-be590feaa05a&DisplayLang=en

Unfortunately we cannot redistribute them since that would force us to have a more restrictive licence.

Startup

The application is started by launching the executable file "boorucam.exe" from the installation package.

When Booru Webcam 2.0 is started you get a little tray icon in the lower right corner of your screen. All functions of the program are accessed from the tray menu that is available by right-clicking on the tray icon or the preview window (unless it is hidden or ghosted). The preview window appears by default somewhere in the middle of the screen. It can easily be enabled/disabled by either left-clicking the tray icon once or by right-clicking the tray icon and then selecting "Show Preview" in the menu. To start viewing a camera or some other image source (TV-card etc), use the Camera submenu of the tray menu to select one.

The window keeps its settings (visibility, position, size, etc.) from the last time Booru Webcam was up and running. That means if you hide the preview window and then exit the application, the window will still be hidden the next time you start Booru Webcam. Similarly, the application will start uploading images to an FTP server as soon as it is started if this was enabled during the last session.

Tray Menu

Right-clicking on the BooruCam tray icon brings up the tray menu. The following options become available:

Main menu

Instant grab: Saves/uploads current image instantly
Enable FTP-upload: Enables/disables FTP uploading
Show Preview: Shows/hides the preview window
Camera: The Camera submenu (see below)
Options...: Open the options dialog
Help: The Help submenu; opens help for getting started, user manual and program version (About...)
Quit: Exit the application

Camera Submenu

This menu displays a list of the cameras and other image sources that are available on the system. Selecting an item here changes the current input source. The following two items are displayed for sources that support them:

Settings...: Shows the source-specific settings for the current image source, such as brightness, contrast etc.
Image Format...: Shows the source-specific image format dialog for the current image source. This is where resolution and frame rate are specified.

Preview Window

The preview window continually shows you the image that Booru Webcam produces from after applying all effects on the image grabbed from the webcam. What you see in the preview window is what will be saved to file or uploaded to the Internet.

The first time you start Booru Webcam the preview window will probably only show a still image. This happens when no image source has been selected (see selecting image source).

Ghosting

Optionally, the preview window becomes transparent (ghosted) after a short amount of time when the mouse pointer is placed over it. This is to allow clicking on things beneath it without having to move the window. The ghosting behavior can be configured in the Ghosting section of the Options dialog

Options Dialog

Click on the icon on the left hand side to select an options section. The following sections are available:

Image Overlay

This plugin draws an image on top of the current frame.

Enable image overlay: Enables/disables the image overlay
File: The image to draw. Push "Browse..." to select a new one
Placement: Sets where the selected image is placed within the current frame
Margin: Sets the margin around the image (in pixels)

Text Overlay

This plugin draws text on top of the current frame.

Enable text overlay: Enables/disables the text overlay
Text: The text to display. The current capture image is updated immediately when the text is changed. It is possible to use string expansion here, to get current time/date as an example.
Typeface: Selects the font and size to use for the text
Color: The text color
Transparency: The text transparency
Placement: Sets where the text is located within the current image
Margin: Sets the horizontal and vertical margin around the text (in pixels)
Shadow: Shows a drop shadow beneath the text when enabled

Image and FTP

Note: All options under the Image and FTP-section are temporary and are not activated until the "Ok"-button on the options dialog is pressed.

Image Capture

Interval: The number of seconds to wait until saving the next image. This interval is shared between both the Save Image and FTP Upload-options.
If image capture is desired only when manually selecting Instant Grab from the main menu, deactivate automatic saving by setting the interval to "0".
Format: The type of file to be saved. Use JPEG (.jpg) to save space, PNG for perfect quality
Quality: The quality used when saving images as JPEG; set low to get small files, high to get good looking images, but with larger files as result.

Save Image

Enable Save Image: Starts/stop the saving of current image to disk
Filename: Name and location of the file to save. Use the "Browse..." button to browse. The path should end in a base filename, i.e. the desired name without a suffix (.jpg etc), since this is automatically added when the images is saved. See the section about string expansions for more possibilities. If you do not use string expansions the image file will be overwritten each time with the new image. Warning: if you are not careful, using string expansions could result in filling up the disk space with images, since images would never be overwritten.

FTP Upload

Enable FTP upload

Starts/stop the uploading of current image to an ftp

URL

The destination address to which the current image is uploaded. This should include a user name, a host name, a path and a base filename. Example: ftp://user@hostname/path/filename ftp://arnold@myftp.com/upload/images/webcamImageThe same rules for file naming apply here as described in Save Image.

Password

Unless you are uploading to an anonymous FTP site, you should specify the FTP password here that matches the user name in the URL field

Passive mode

If you are behind a firewall and experience problems with FTP uploading, enable this.

Use temp file

If the FTP site does not allow overwriting the same file with new contents, enable this option to create a new temporary file and then exhanging it with the previous file each time an upload is done

Disconnect after upload

If enabled, the program will log in for each upload and disconnect when done. Otherwise, the same connection is used for all uploads

Fail silently

Check this box to stop messages from apperaring when there is a problem with the upload. This can be desirable if the program is running unsupervised, since an error message whould halt the application until the error was acknowledged

General

Preview Window

Enable preview window: Shows/hides the window
Window transparency: Sets the transparency of the preview window
Window zoom: Enlarges or shrinks the window. 100% = the size of the original captured image
Default image: Selects the still image that is shown when no capture source is available

Ghosting

Ghost delay: Sets the delay between when the mouse pointer enters the preview window and when the window becomes ghosted
Ghost transparency: Sets the transparency of the preview window when it is ghosted

Advanced

Look for new versions...: Connect to the product home page and check for new versions when the application is started

Appendix

String expansions

String expansion is a function that is used in different places in Booru Webcam 2.0. The purpose of string expansions is to make the texts (e.g. the text overlay or the file name) dynamic. The text will change automatically according to some simple rules.

Take for example that you want to save all the captured images. Ordinarily each image would be overwritten by the next image that comes from the web camera. A solution to this would be to enumerate the images like this

PartyImage1.jpg PartyImage2.jpg PartyImage3.jpg PartyImage4.jpg ...

String expansions solves this problem in a simple way. We set the image filename to PartyImage%i and Booru Webcam will replace the %i with a number that is incremented for each saved image. (The ".jpg" extension is added automatically to the filename when saving as a JPEG-file)

All the following control sequences can be used anyhere in a string that uses string expansion. The same control sequence can be used multiple times in a single string.

%d: Datestamp, user locale dependent short date as set in windows.
%t: Timestamp, user locale dependent time format
%i: Incremented ID.
%j: Another incremented ID, independet of %i.

Example usage

C:\ImageArchive\%d\Home-%t

This filename specified for images that should be saved locally could produce the following files.

C:\ImageArchive\2005-10-07\Home-11:44:26.jpg C:\ImageArchive\2005-10-07\Home-11:54:26.jpg C:\ImageArchive\2005-10-07\Home-12:04:26.jpg C:\ImageArchive\2005-10-07\Home-12:14:26.jpg ... C:\ImageArchive\2005-10-08\Home-01:34:26.jpg C:\ImageArchive\2005-10-08\Home-01:44:26.jpg

Changes from version 1.x

Booru Webcam 2.0 is a completely rewritten program from the ground up. This was done due to various reasons.

Extensibility. To make it easier for future features and upgrades.
Image quality. DirectX is used to get the best image quality directly from the webcam drivers.

A goal has been to keep as much of the same functionality from previous versions as possible, with the addition of new useful features. Though some features might have changed due to various reasons, we have tried to continue in the spirit of the original Booru Webcam with an easy-to-use, slim but powerful application.

At first sight you might notice that Booru Webcam 2.0 uses more memory than previous versions. This has a lot to do with the use of Microsoft's DirectX. Unfortunately the overhead is larger than before, but in return we will be able to do a lot of new impressive stuff. This will become obvious in the near future when new functions are added. We have a whole slew of great and fun ideas that we wish to implement ASAP.

Cleaning

When you clean, make sure that you do it top-down. Start with dusting the upper portions of your rooms. If you would for example start off with vacuuming the kitchen floor (which in many cases are in a really desperate need of vacuuming) chances are that you later on would get bread crumbs on the floor when wiping of the bread board. The result is obviously that you would have to redo the vacuuming part.

Another tip to enhance the effect of the cleaning process is to pay attention to the little details. Like aligning the candlesticks, straightening the table cloth and removing the dead hairy dog from the hallway.

DISCLAIMER: ANY ADVICE GIVEN ON THESE PAGES ARE PROVIDED "AS IS". NEITHER LUMAI NOR BOORU TAKES ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE PERFORMANCE, SUITABILITY OR MERCHANTABILITY OF THESE ADVICES. LUMAI DISCLAIMS ANY STANDARD OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR MERCHANTABILITY.