Category: News

In some ways, not much change is visible in version 1.5, but behind the scenes there has been a lot of work, particularly for DirectShow cameras which have a completely new preview/capture implementation with a number of advantages :

• No more ugly (and annoying) stop/start of preview when switching to/from capture mode
• Much less code, hopefully less bugs!
• A new frame divisor filter to drop all frames but 1 in N.
• Ability (in future version) to apply transform filters to the AVI output if desired.

The pre-release versions have been out a while and no-one has reported any significant bugs with the new DirectShow implementation, so I’m hoping it’s solid. If it does break, please report the problem in the usual way, and anyway you can go back to using the old DirectShow code by looking further down the cameras menu.

Anyway, enough of that. The download link can be found here.

At long last, SharpCap 1.4 has moved from Beta into a full release. Sorry for the long delay – been busy recently with non-Astro stuff.

Here’s what is new in 1.4 :

• Long exposure support for Basler cameras (unlimited exposure time)
• Parallel port control support for LX modified webcams
• Automatic USB serial port selection for LX modified webcams – chooses highest numbered serial port.
• Frame progress bar shown for all cameras in LX mode to show how far through the current frame you are
• Single frame capture support for all supported cameras types
• Multiple output formats supported  – SER, PNG, FITS for non-webcam cameras
• Experimental support for any camera with an ASCOM driver
• Improved capture file handling – formats that produce multiple files like PNG and FITS create a folder and save them into it
• Many bug fixes

Get the release build of 1.4 from the downloads page.