Sebastian Held emailed the tellico-users group about some code he wrote to use his webcam to scan barcodes and feed them into Tellico. It looks very impressive.

Basically, he has a script that captures frame from the webcam using mplayer, sends them to BaToo, a barcode recognition package, then passes the resulting ISBN value to Tellico using DCOP. He uses DCOP in ways I didn’t even know was possible, showing a dialog, editing a specific widget, clicking a button.

Webcam integration is one of the most-heralded features of Delicious Library, and several other collection management software package provide it as well. BaToo is written in Java, and Sebastian has some helper classes around that. Getting it integrated into Tellico would be a big job, but wow, what a cool thing to have! I may start playing with it some, though I don’t have a webcam.