On-line Webcam: What is needed? Software

On-line Webcam: What is needed? Software

What do we need to put our on-line webcam on internet?

We'll need a software that gets a shoot from our webcam and saves the image on the hard disk to upload it to a FTP server located somewhere on the internet. This shoot must be captured every specified time period, that may be for example: 10, 30 or 60 seconds, it depends on what you want and on your internet conection speed.
People who wants to see your on-line webcam, have to use a web browser watch your web site on-line camera, and request your webcam images, that will be embeded on a auto-refresh .html file

First at all we must have a working webcam with drivers installed on our system. If we are using MS Windows, we can test this by running Imaging under: Start/applications/accessories and try to take an image. If it works, the next step is to download a webcam software to upload the images to the FTP a good choice is: this search, we may suggest you to try KabCam it's a shareware version that you can try freely for 30 days. Try some webcam software and choose yourself a good one.

Once installed you search for Configuration options and select your capturing device and the image format, that means mainly: Image size and File type.
Image size: Width and Height for the image, usually webcams best size is 640x480 pixels (WidthxHeight) but if you don't own an ADSL or RDSI it can be too large for upload, 320x200 will be very fast to upload on any kind of connection.
File type: .JPG of course will be the best choice. It's the standard for image compression all over internet, it gives you good compression (you can select %), good quality and any browser could load it.

Next step is to type your FTP server address, user name, password, directory and image name and select the upload time, that means the upload frecuency.
For example:

Size: 320x200
Fomat: .jpg
Server: ftp.mydomain.com
User: myusername
Password: *******
Directory: images
Image Name: final.jpg
Upload Time: 30 seconds

We must now upload a .html file that will refresh itself every 30 seconds. You could do it with your usual FTP client.

There are some other ways to put your on-line webcam like activeX controls or java applets, but this software maybe doesn't work on all the web browsers.
If you want to have your own TV channel, take a look to RealSystem Server Basic

This is the simplest html code that we could use in our page.html, copy and paste it on a text editor and save it (webcam.html)

-------------------------- html code ----------------------
<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="30">
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="Tue, 01 Jan 1980 1:00:00 GMT">
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="webcam,camara,video,online">
<meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="webcam">
<title>On-Line WebCam</title>
<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!-- HIDING
var x = 30
var y = 1

function StartClock(){
   x = x-y
   if (x > -1) document.form1.clock.value = x
   timerID = setTimeout("StartClock()", 1000)}
// END HIDING -->
</script>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" onLoad="StartClock()">

<center>
<h1>
<font face="Arial,Helvetica,Verdana"><font size=-1>WebCam</font></font></h1></center>

<center>
<p><br><img SRC="final.jpg" ALT="WebCam Image" BORDER=1 >
<br><form NAME="form1"><b><font face="Arial"><font size=-1>New image
en ~ <input TYPE="text" NAME="clock" SIZE="2" VALUE>seconds.</font></font></b>
</form></center>
<br><br>
<center>
<h3>
<font face="Arial,Helvetica,Verdana"><font size=-1>This is a on-line webcam</font></font>
</h3>
</center>
</body>
</html>

------------------- html code end --------------------

by DrDoom