Over the last year or so I’ve established that the Sony HDR-CX160 can be used in combination with the AVerMedia C027 HDMI capture card as a sort of high-definition, fancy non-standard “Webcam”. However, it’s a special kind of Webcam, because it doesn’t work with just any kind of Webcam software. The program has to be able to pick the right input (often labelled as “S-Video” for some reason) in order to work. Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder was able to do this, as was SongShow Plus and Yawcam. However, it should be noted that traditional, simple Webcam programs have NOT worked during all the times that we’ve tried to connect it to the AVerMedia HDMI input card.
The thing is, even though the HDMI capture card presents itself as a DirectShow Webcam, without the option within a program itself to make adjustments to the settings, the HDMI input will NOT work. At least, it didn’t in any of our tests, and we used updated versions of the C027 drivers. The card does not work with Skype, for example, because Skype doesn’t allow for the changing of the input on a Webcam, at least as far as we know. We tested this quite extensively, as we really wanted to get it to work. It probably won’t work with most video chat programs, in fact, for the same reason.
This is saying more about the way the C027 works, then about the camcorder. It’s possible that another one of AVerMedia’s cards will in fact work as a standard Webcam. It’s just that the one we tried did not. The camcorder, of course, simply outputs a steady steam through it’s miniHDMI output, and it should be readable by any HDMI input card – the question is, how does the input card present itself to the operating system? As a standard DirectShow Webcam, or as something else? Thanks for reading.
