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.
Also, any good voip type applications that have both Linux and Windows versions anc can use a webcam for video phonecalls? Skype doesn't have video on Linux.
Chris G cl@isbd.net wrote: [...]
Also, any good voip type applications that have both Linux and Windows versions anc can use a webcam for video phonecalls? [...]
There's a win32 build of linphone listed on http://www.linphone.org/index.php/fre/download
While I don't use it for video, I've not yet broken linphone...
Regards,
On Tue, Oct 16, 2007 at 11:14:36PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
Chris G cl@isbd.net wrote: [...]
Also, any good voip type applications that have both Linux and Windows versions anc can use a webcam for video phonecalls? [...]
There's a win32 build of linphone listed on http://www.linphone.org/index.php/fre/download
While I don't use it for video, I've not yet broken linphone...
Thank you, that looks like a good possibility.
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
http://www.tokbox.com I had a go with that yesterday, very smooth. Worked under RH5 atleast on a logitech webcam.
Rich
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.
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Chris G -
MJ Ray -
Richard Bensley -
Wayne Stallwood