WebCam OpenSource or Free Software?

[Daniel B. Thurman]

Hi Folks,

Does anyone have any suggestions for WebCam software, opensourced or
free?  I am thinking about creating the software myself but I wanted to see
if there are other people doing it already.  So far, I have looked at:

1) FWink
2) WebCam2000
3) Many others but I have not looked at them all....

But these support rather rudimentary things and I need to have
more "bells and whistles" as outlined in the following paragraphs.

I am currently using webcam32 which is/was a really good product for
what I wanted to do, but for the most part it is now legacy and not really
supported anymore unless I wanted to pay big-bucks to upgrade.  A company
has purchased the webcam32 software from Kolban and their stuff is not
cheap for what I wanted to do.

What I am interested in is the following features:

1) Support for many cameras. I have an old winnov that supports up to 3
cameras on a framegrabber card so this particular one is seen as ONE camera
from Windows point of view, but I can use a proprientary dll to switch the cameras
and change built-in properties.  I guess support different cameras and cards
here might be a bit difficult but anyway it might be a fun project.

2) Supports streaming, so that independent systems w/ cameras on them
can stream the data to whatever site that queries it.  Can be directed to a
webpage for streaming or single frame capture.

3) Support for full-axis camera movement for cameras that support it.

4) Has security features; the ability to compare frames at high-speed to
"motion detect" as a percentage of change from 1% to 99%  Maybe there
is other security features that can be done but this is one that I know about
supported on webcam32 from Kolban

5) Support for FTP, dialup, multi-file formats (jpg,giff,?) and whatever useful
things that are nice even if not absolutely necessary?  I use the FTP so that the
data can be moved into a secured central fileserver and filenames are auto-managed.

I am sure there could be more that can be added than the list above, but I think
the project will need to start with a basic framework and keep it simple and then
add little by little as it evolves.

Thanks!
Dan

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