[ALUG] Webcam, what software?

[Chris G]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 11:59:34PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 22:03 +0100, Chris G wrote:
> > 
> > This seems very stupid but I can't really work out what Linux software
> > can do useful things with a Webcam.
> > 
> > The obvious thing to want to do is to show what the webcam is seeing
> > on the web.  I have apache 2.2 running. 
> 
> The quick and dirty way is to first get your camera working as a v4l
> device and then capture images as per a schedule using something like
> the webcam tool from xawtv (camE is another similar tool with some more
> advanced features like timestamps etc). This will as defined by a
> schedule snapshot a frame from the camera and present it as a jpeg which
> than then be added to a page with a refresh cycle. The idea being of
> course to keep the framerate low enough that even with several viewers
> your bandwidth and server load does not suffer.
> 
> Short of that and if you want full motion then you are probably into
> streaming and encoding images from the camera on demand and on the fly.
> But in either case getting the camera to play in v4l would be my first
> step. Then I would look towards something like camserv 
> 
> There should be enough keywords there to find some tutorial via google
> if you need more specifics
> 
Thanks, as you say there should be enough there to get me started, I
was just totally at sea initially.

-- 
Chris Green