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I am looking to stream what the camera sees onto a series of OpenGL ES textures. Getting them to display on the textures is not difficult, however, it isn't clear that the UIImagePickerController is able to grab images from the camera before the user takes a snapshot.

Tagged with 3gs because of the new video capture API.

Michael Labbé
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  • This appears to be a related thread. Certainly with relevant comments: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/601381/getting-an-image-representation-of-the-camera-preview-in-uiimagepickercontroller – Michael Labbé Jul 05 '09 at 21:30
  • Also, it appears that there is an app called "RedLaser" which was approved by Apple. It overlays a red bar on the camera and lets you do realtime scanning of barcodes. http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/05/red-laser-the-first-accurate-iphone-barcode-scanner-hits-the-app-store.html However, it isn't available in the "Canadian" iTunes store as of this writing. That means it could have been pulled after approval. – Michael Labbé Jul 05 '09 at 21:38
  • No, it means they got lucky and their reviewer didn't realize they are doing something they shouldn't. Sometimes you can get away with it, but there is no guarantee you will, and they review every time you push an update, so you might end up with a deployed app whose update starts getting rejected because its core functionality is not allowed. – Louis Gerbarg Jul 06 '09 at 10:05

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This is not supported in the iPhone SDK. While there are some hacks people have done (that involve scrapping the data off the texture the builtin in UI is displaying to the user) using them will probably result in your app getting rejected from the store.

The only supported way to get video data is to use the Apple UI and then ask for the resulting move after it is done recording. If you need realtime video data you should file a bug with Apple explaining why.

Louis Gerbarg
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  • Does this answer take into account the new UIVideoEditorController class added recently? There seems to be a dearth of documentation on the subject. – Michael Labbé Jul 05 '09 at 18:46
  • Anything that was added as part of the 3.1 SDK is still under NDA, so if you have questions about any new functionality that was added you should ask in 3.1 section of Apple's developer forums . Having said that, I am fairly confident my answer will remain correct for the forseeable future. – Louis Gerbarg Jul 06 '09 at 10:03