How to Embed Camera App in Front Panel

[Steve.Eggo.SA]

Windows 10, LabVIEW 2020
I wish to embed the Microsoft Camera App into a LabVIEW front panel. It needs to show the live pictures coming from the camera. Eventually I want to embed 2 camera pictures.
I wish to do this to avoid using the DAQmx drivers that require a license for deployment.
I can launch the Camera App by passing the following to the command line via the System Exec vi
cmd /c start microsoft.windows.camera:

This opens the Camera App in a separate window, I need it to be embedded in the front panel.
I have tried using an active X container and Insert ActiveX object, Camera is not listed.
The Camera exe can be found in "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsCamera_2023.2312.3.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\WindowsCamera.exe". This folder is protected and when I remove the protection and call it directly there are errors about missing dlls (mrt100_app.dll and then SharedLibrary.dll)

Anyone have any bright ideas.
 

[Lior Bilia]

There are some computer vision libraries out there (OpenCV, Emgu, AForge etc.) that make capturing a camera feed easy.

[Zou]

If you can't get ActiveX to work, you can always use Windows API.

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/How-to-run-an-exe-as-a-window-inside-a-VI/m-p/4096356

 

[Steve.Eggo.SA]

Thanks to Lior Bilia I have found this on GitHub
https://github.com/barrowsb/labview_opencv
With some modification, it allows me to use the OpenCV project to open the camera and display its video feed in a picture box. This avoids having to use ActiveX and more importantly for my application avoids the use of DAQmx drivers that require a license for deployment.

[hooovahh]

If you want to just plop a window inside another one you can do that using some Windows API calls.  Here is an example I made putting notepad on the front panel of a VI.

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/How-to-run-an-exe-as-a-window-inside-a-VI/m-p/3113729#M893102

Also there isn't any DAQmx runtime license cost.  If you built your application then the EXE runs without anything extra.  There is a NI Vision runtime license cost so maybe that is what you are thinking?

If you have a camera stream you can also view it by using VLC.  VLC can view a camera stream, and then you can use an ActiveX container to get VLC on your front panel.  USB cameras are a bit trickier but if you can get the stream to work in VLC, you can get it to work in LabVIEW.  Here is an example of that.

https://forums.ni.com/t5/Example-Code/VLC-scripting-in-LabVIEW/ta-p/3515450