macOS how to access iChat video frames

[carolyn.lee]

Hi, All

I would like to develop an application which can capture and filter the iChat video frames in real-time (e.g. Alice is chatting with me through the ichat video conference, I want to develop my own application which can access the video frames from Alice and process it in real time) .

Right now the application works fine for the video file. But when it comes to the iChat video, I don't know how to access the ichat video frames in real-time. Anyone has any clue on this? Thanks!


Regards!


carolyn

 

[kainjow]

You might be able to do this with iChat Theater or Quartz Composer.

 

[carolyn.lee]

Hi, kainjow, thanks for the reply!

iChat theater is a good way to share video. But that is not what I want.

I just want to access and process the video frames including the other buddy's figure when I am video chatting with the other buddy.

About the Quartz Composer, can you explain it a little bit in details on how to get the video frames of the iChat video conference.

By the way, are there any way to use core video or core image programming to access those video frames? Thanks!

 

[kainjow]

The reason I mentioned iChat Theater is because you can write a plugin to give any kind of visual data to iChat, so I'm sure you could write a plugin that takes the video input and send it to iChat as well as record it.

I know very little with Quartz Composer but I'm pretty sure you can write QC plugins for iChat as well, and QC is powerful stuff, so I wouldn't be surprised if you could scrape something together with that.

Just ideas. Anything else would probably take some lower level, undocumented hacking of iChat.