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