Publish Streaming Web Cam

[ukgimp]

Hello

I have a fast LAN connection to the web and I would like to publish a streaming webcam for a laugh. Could anyone recommend how to go about doing this. I have access to a server but i am unsure of the process and whether the security bods would like me to leave a constant connection. I have spent some time looking for the answers, only to get vague solutions.

Cheers

Richard

[lorax]

Well my first question is do you need a live stream or would bite sized moments suffice?
Live streams require a dedicated connection from the source to the web server and then the web server must be running a web streaming server in order to dole out the movie. Normally hosts charge for this service.

A cheap way around this is to write out the movie every 5 minutes (or some such) and then upload it to the web server. Just overwrite the file everytime so as not to consume disk space. It's not streaming in that when someone clicks on the link to your movie, their browser will need to download the entire movie (or at least enough to fill the buffer in the player) before it will begin to play. So the catch is you'll need to choose settings which keep the movie file to a reasonable size.

Check out:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[keyplyr]

I investigated the same thought a while back. The monthly bandwidth limit alloted by my ISP would have been surpassed very quickly (in a day or two.) ISPs rarely publish their upstream bandwidth limits but they all have them.

I use cable broadband LAN. They have a biz package that would accomodate the stream but the expense would have been significant. My virtual host offers a stream server, so it would have worked out fine if only I could get the stream there.

I settled for webcam snapshots with this free software:

[auvico.net...]

This is video only. It works great and you can set the frames for as fast as 3 seconds with the redundant ftp which overwrites the previous pic. However, at the time of this post, the website was undergoing maintenance.

If you wish to see an example of this program in use, go to the site in my profile, drop to the bottom of the page and click "studio webcam" however sometimes I have it turned off.