WebCam

Quick, Dirty, and Cheap

[jbinbpt]

A F.I.R.S.T. Robotics team I’m helping wants to add a webcam for their site. Any suggestions on a quick and easy way to do this? They don’t have a lot of money and will only be running for a few hours a day. Any info or suggestions?
jb

[Mardi_Gras]

Do you want to stream video or just transmit a new still photo every minute or so? The latter is simple and should just require a camera ($100 or so) and decent webcam software. I use kabcam but there are lots of others (coffee cup, webcam 32, etc.), almost all with free trials.

Streaming video brings in bandwidth issues. I don't have any signicant experience with it.

[jbinbpt]

I believe snapshot mode... With a meta refreash would do or is there a better method?

[Mardi_Gras]

your software will include script to insert to automatically update the photo in most browsers at an interval that you select.

[jbinbpt]

That's looks to be just what they need.

Thanks

Happy New Year

[c3oc3o]

VisionGS (.de) is a good webcam program that will both do periodical FTP uploads or actually serve the images, streaming or not, from the machine as a basic web server. If you want streaming, that should work fine on a broadband connection and expecting no more than a dozen or so visitors at once. For higher volumes, FTP upload is recommended.
The trial version periodically adds their link to uploaded images and stops streams after a minute, full version is $25.

[HughMungus]

I've had the same copy of webcam32 forever and it works great (highly customizable).

You can find pages with metarefresh to copy everywhere (it's a javascript trick).