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PTZ Control For the Logitech BCC950 Conference Cam

Logitech-Conference-cam-BCC950The code, the code, my kingdom for the code!” – Richard III

My apologies to Will Shakespeare but I find myself thinking this way about Logitech’s BCC950 Conference Cam. You may remember it from when it was featured in a VUC session back in November of 2012. At that time the BCC950 was newly released but I managed to buy one to have some experience with it for the occasion of their appearance.

Since then it’s been a fixture on my desk. in fact, I find a lot to like about the BCC950. It’s long stem puts the camera at a nice height so that it’s gaze is not looking up or down at me. In that regard it’s actually better than the Logitech C920 webcam sitting on top of my monitor, although both create fine quality video streams for UC or vodcasting applications.

What it lacked was any kind of integration of its pan, tilt, zoom control with application code for any common soft client. I’m told that one of the enterprise video conference clients (Vidyo?) has included far-end camera control that was aware of the BCC950.

Back in 2012 Microsoft employee Scott Hanselman has put together a tool to control the BCC959 using Azure and SignalR, but this was not something that the average user would find useful. It was a project to illustrate how it could be done.

So remote control of the PTZ capability of the Logitech BCC950 remained largely untouched until now. This week Logitech released a new video conference end-point called the ConferenceCam CC3000e. In addition, they have released a set of plug-ins that provide remote PTZ control of both the CC3000e and BCC950. There are plug-ins for the following soft clients:

  • Cisco Jabber
  • Skype
  • Microsoft Lync 2013
  • Microsoft Lync 2010

The availability of such tools was not known to me until now. I’ll certainly be giving them a try. As none of them are indicated as being v1.0 it’s possible that they’ve been offered for a while

More about the CC3000e to follow….

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