How do I retrieve iPhone camera or video images before the user presses the snapshot button?

Question

I am looking to stream what the camera sees onto a series of OpenGL ES textures. Getting them to display on the textures is not difficult, however, it isn't clear that the UIImagePickerController is able to grab images from the camera before the user takes a snapshot.

Tagged with 3gs because of the new video capture API.

Answer 1

This is not supported in the iPhone SDK. While there are some hacks people have done (that involve scrapping the data off the texture the builtin in UI is displaying to the user) using them will probably result in your app getting rejected from the store.

The only supported way to get video data is to use the Apple UI and then ask for the resulting move after it is done recording. If you need realtime video data you should file a bug with Apple explaining why.