WebCam System.

[Roger Heflin]

Tim wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 14:57 -0600, Roger Heflin wrote:
>> so you may want to use the higher dollar ethernet cams that
>> don't have such a cabling limit, and then find something similar
>> to motion (or modify motion if necessary) to work with them.
> 
> I've been contemplating this, but hadn't found a reasonably priced
> camera that would work with Linux.  There's a few that have a demo on
> their websites that lets you connect to one of their cameras, but the
> camera's inbuilt webserver demanded MSIE.  Anybody know of some that
> don't?

I did not realize that they required that sort of stuff.  There
are 4-5 different IP zoom webcams that I found that looked
decent though pricy, I don't know if they play nice with
linux, I would probably set up a server with wget (if it allowed
that) and collect the images and feed them to motion (or something
similar) and let motion or other software export things out
of the main server.  I don't know how well motion will play
with an IP webcam.


> 
> I'm considering a USB webcam looking through the window for something
> close to a PC (where USB is still practical), but I never managed to
> find some software that would take a still from my USB camera and put it
> on the webserver.
> 

Motion will take an images and put it on its own web server, on
its own port.

You can program it to update at a certain rate, or to update
only when motion is detected, and you can adjust what is defined
as motion (how many pixel changes).  And you can set it up to
save images when motion happens.

I used it with both a logitech pro 4000 (640x480-not too bad), and
a older 320x2?? logitech camera (resolution and colors kind of sucked).

I had mine pointed at my driveway, and it did seem to properly
work, though its low light abilities are rather poor, ie it can
only see head and tail lights at night.   And I did need to
cover the webcam otherwise inside light reflecting off of the
window tended to reduce the image quality sometimes to useless.

                         Roger