A Pointman extension: stills, clips and a live pane from any camera a node can see. The built-in camera, USB webcams, a phone's camera (Continuity Camera), capture cards, and most Sony, Canon, Nikon and Fuji bodies over USB, with no app from their maker. It's generic, tied to no other extension. Its live pane is a Pointman video pane: the node seals each frame and sends it straight to the app that opened it, never through Pointman's server.

One Rust binary, bin/cam, built for each platform and written with the pointman-extension crate.

• ffmpeg reads what the system sees as a camera: avfoundation's video devices on macOS (not its screens), v4l2's capture nodes on Linux. A camera in USB streaming mode is one of these.
• gphoto2 reads a camera in its PC Remote mode on USB, the protocol its maker's own app uses: live view as MJPEG, and a still that's a real photo, taken by the camera at its full size. On macOS, PTPCamera grabs every such camera, so cam stops it just before gphoto2 needs the camera (launchd starts it again later).
• test is a test card (ffmpeg's testsrc2, with its running time drawn on) that works anywhere.

A camera is named by its number (0, g0 for gphoto2's), its name, or any part of its name, in any case: device=sony. With none named, the device setting decides. With none set, cam takes the likeliest real camera: a body in PC Remote mode, then the first camera that isn't a Desk View or virtual, and a virtual one (OBS's, Imaging Edge Webcam's, Snap Camera, Camo…, by their names) only when there's nothing else. cam.list marks the virtual ones. Nothing needs setting up on a camera: cam asks each one which sizes and rates it has and picks one of those (avfoundation takes only a rate at the top of one of a mode's ranges; v4l2 gets MJPEG where the camera has it). A camera that's unplugged and plugged back in is found again by name.

A Sony a6400 (and most bodies): set its USB connection to PC Remote once, plug it in, and it's in cam.list. Install gphoto2 first: brew install gphoto2 on a Mac, apt install gphoto2 on Debian or Ubuntu, or nix's gphoto2.

Run on a machine like any extension's: /cam list, /cam still sony, /cam clip 0 20 in a thread, or create_job for agents.

A still or clip on a camera only one program can use at a time (gphoto2's, and any on Linux) pauses a live pane on it, and starts it again after.

live is a video pane (opens = ["menu", "command"], target {device}): the camera's frames as JPEGs, sealed by the node and sent straight to the app that opened it.

• The camera runs only while a path is attached (pane.viewers above 0), so its light is off otherwise.
• The app's hints set its rate and width (max_fps: 0 pauses it), within the settings; a width is rounded up to 320, 480, 640, 960, 1280, 1920, 2560 or 3840, so resizing a window doesn't restart the camera at each pixel.
• ffmpeg (or gphoto2) writes MJPEG, cut into whole JPEGs by their markers. The newest waits in one slot and goes out as pane.frame, so a slow viewer never backs up the camera.
• If the camera stops sending, cam tries again 1 s later, doubling to 30 s, and finds it again by name.

Sound, when there's any: the camera's own microphone (a webcam's, a capture card's HDMI audio, the Mac's beside its built-in camera: the microphone whose name is the camera's), or the one the audio setting names; for the test card, a 440 Hz sine with a beep each second. A gphoto2 body's live view has none unless audio names a microphone. The open says so in its video's audio: {"codec": "CODEC_AAC", "rate": 48000, "channels": 1}.

• A second ffmpeg (avfoundation's audio device on macOS, ALSA through plughw on Linux) encodes it with its aac to ADTS. Whole frames go out in order as pane.audio, two at a time (43 ms), each timed by its samples rather than by when it arrived.
• It runs while a path is attached and the app's speaker is on: audio: false stops the microphone, and the pictures carry on. A hint says only what changed, so the speaker's leaves the rate and width alone.

Per machine, in ~/.config/pointman/extensions/cam/config.toml:

cargo test. The tests run cam under the SDK's stand-in node with fake ffmpeg, gphoto2 and killall on a PATH of their own (tests/common), so none reaches a real camera or the real PTPCamera, and the test card with the real ffmpeg (skipped without one). CI checks cargo fmt and cargo clippy too.

A release is a tag that's extension.toml's version: .github/workflows/release.yml builds the four platforms and attaches them, as rota's does.