<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>floatingatoll</author><text>Mac support is implemented using a CoreMediaIO plugin, hinting that they are &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; updating the camera firmware to speak USB webcam, which prevents driverless use of the device:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    &amp;#x2F;Library&amp;#x2F;CoreMediaIO&amp;#x2F;Plug-Ins&amp;#x2F;DAL&amp;#x2F;ImagingEdgeWebcam.plugin
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Could someone with a Sony camera please verify on macOS 10.15 (with ASR enabled) &lt;i&gt;whether&lt;/i&gt; this webcam support is usable from within Apple&amp;#x27;s desktop FaceTime app? What protocol version and speed of USB does it negotiate with the computer, assuming you&amp;#x27;re using a modern USB cable and not the one it shipped with?&lt;p&gt;That plugin contains `LjAdapter`, the same name used on both Mac and Win, and specifically `Lja_PTP_USB.dylib&amp;#x2F;dll` — hinting that they&amp;#x27;ve written a convertor that takes in USB Picture-to-Picture protocol and writes out USB Web Camera protocol.&lt;p&gt;I get the distinct impression that this is a list of USB device IDs. Those of you who know how to spoof USB manufacturer and device IDs may want to try spoofing any random off-the-shelf USB PTP webcam with one of these and see if you can use this library to speak to it.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    [Dev:%lx]
    0x0CCC, 0x0C43, 0x0D2B, 0x0D18, 0x0D1C, 0xD9F, 0x0DA3&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Sony cameras can now be used as webcams for Mac</title><url>https://support.d-imaging.sony.co.jp/app/webcam/en/download/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>jseliger</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s fascinating to watch the camera companies slowly catch up to where Elgato was years ago; their failure to &amp;quot;think beyond the box&amp;quot; may help explains why camera sales peaked around 2012 and have been falling ever since.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong: I still have a standalone Fuji camera, but I&amp;#x27;m unusually interested in photo aesthetics. For most people, ease of use and convenience wins, and that it took this long for Sony to release software to enable this pretty obvious functionality explains what&amp;#x27;s wrong with most of the big camera companies.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Sony cameras can now be used as webcams for Mac</title><url>https://support.d-imaging.sony.co.jp/app/webcam/en/download/</url></story>