I had to set up a system like this for a client. Basically, the process
needs to work by attaching the web cam to a video board (like the Winnov)
and having software that snags a jpg from the video feed every 20
minutes. Generally speaking, as long as the video board supports Video for
Windows (known as vfw), then the web cam software you install should be
able to work with the board. There are some setups that allow you to
remotely control the camera (pan and zoom) and you may need tighter
integration between web cam software and video feed in that case. I tried
using Webcam32 and found that I really didn't like it much, in spite of the
fact that it appears to be the most popular software out there. Right now,
we're using ChillCam (http://www.thegeek.com/chillcam/default.asp) and I'm
pretty happy with it thus far.
We have the software running on startup on two P133's with 32MB of RAM
running NT SP5. It's running NT because the client has the machines
sitting in broom closets and such and doesn't want people to have easy
access to the machines. We have it set to grab a photo every 2 minutes and
ftp the image to the web server. On the web server, I've got a scheduled
task set up to copy the file into the main web directory every two
minutes. I do this so that there won't be any file locking problems with
the web server accessing the file while the ftp session is trying to upload
it. The scheduled task checks to make sure that the file exists, that it's
not a 0 K file, that it's newer than the file being overwritten, etc. and
then copies the image. I've got it set to run 6 am to 4:15 pm (ski resort
hours).
By and large, it's worked fine. We ran into a problem when we added a
second camera. To make a long story short, we were running into problems
when 2 ftp sessions were writing files to the same directory at the same
time. We ended up assigning each camera a different ftp username and a
different home directory so that we don't have any file/directory locking
issues. Besides that, it's been pretty straight forward.
If you want to see it in action, go to: http://www.mtbachelor.com/weather.cfm
Hope this helps,
Judah
At 01:22 PM 5/29/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>Client has decided he wants to have a Web cam (Exterior) looking
>over an admittedly super beach next to his hotel. It can get
>spectacularly wild.
>
>So far so good, however he wants to update the pic every 20 mins
>and have every third one stored so users can see what it was like
>on the hour any day of the year 7.am to 7pm.
>
>Never worked with a Web cam but suspect there are some on the list
>who have considered, if not implemented this sort of stuff and
>would welcome some suggestions on any aspect.
>
>Hardware, Do's , Don'ts, Gotchas etc. Web resources and even
>example sites would all be helpful.
>
>The existing site is CF driven so some sort of reference and path
>to the image stored in a table seems to be the most sensible route.
>
>
>Thanks
>
>
>Gordon
>
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