How I set up a live webcam

(Written earlier in March)

Now that I have my webcam all plugged in and the software updated and I’ve finished playing with it - the cat makes for dull subject matter: she just sits there - so I thought I’d do something technical with it and make a live webcam thing. I’m going to write this in tandem with setting it up so you can see exactly how it should - or shouldn’t - be done. So here goes:

1. Search Google for <”how to” live webcam>; click on second link to WebCamWorld. Looks promising so far.
2. Ok, so the camera itself isn’t a webcam, it’s just a camera. It’s a web page fed images from a digital camera.
3. Ok, it’s going to be a snapshot webcam, as opposed to a streaming one, because it uses less bandwidth and is apparently easier to set up. I’ll also be doing images sized 320 x 240 because I’m not bothered about refreshing it particularly often - this is an exercise in can I do it?, not here’s something exciting to show you.
4. Ok, how to do it. Well, I don’t want frames, so I’ll not be using HTML; without frames, it refreshes the whole page, and I don’t want that either. So it’ll be some Javary thing; either Javascript refresh or a Java Applet.
5. Hardware’s not an issue, seeing as I have it already. USB plug ‘n’ play camera. PC. Stuff. You know, a computer.
6. Hmm, so it’s not actually telling me what to actually actually do. Ok, next!
7. Hmm, I’m stuck. I need some software to upload the picture every so often, but the software I have doesn’t recognise the internet connection. Grr.

Update (26/03/06):

C had a look today at the WebCam stuff; he said it was easy, but when I showed him the software that I had tried to use before that didn’t recognise the network, he said that that hadn’t been what he’d used. He found what he’d used, CoffeeCup, and ran that. He’d only minimised the other software though, so the camera couldn’t be used by CoffeeCup, so I accidentally/mistakenly set the default camera to be some other video capture crap which doesn’t seem to exist and now there’s no way to change it. Stupid thing. So, I looked on the Internet for something else, and downloaded Fwink, which doesn’t seem to work either. It’s a known issue that it won’t let you choose the camera if there’s more than one, so it’s clearly chosen the wrong one.

I have just downloaded EasyFreeWebCam to see what that does. Well, I can select the camera and it shows me what the camera sees. Now I just have to faff about with the ftp settings and stuff and we’ll see what happens. Yeah, that seems to work. I’m not sure I’m entirely happy with the results, though, but never mind. You can see the results here if you must.