Gina...
Gina wrote:...and reduced the capture period to 2 mins. Increased compression too, so the image files will be smaller. I'm saving the files locally and been playing them back as a slide show. 5 mins between shots seemed too long.
My WebCam has been in operation for about 2 years now.
I have been using ImageSalsa (shareware) to retrieve one image every minute from the camera - the picture retrieval starts 30 minutes before sunrise and stops 30 minutes after sunset.
Those captured images are saved locally on the hard drive of the computer running ImageSalsa. The image is also watermarked with the updated weather data and the uploaded every minutes to my Internet server, again, by ImageSalsa.
Once a day, MovieSalsa (shareware) takes all those pictures (the number of saved daily pictures varies from 500 during the winter months to more than 900 during the summer months) and produces 2 types of movies, one Flash (swf) movie and one DivX movie. Once the movies are produced, they are uploaded to my Internet server.
I keep 8 movies on my Internet server, 7 Flash movies of the past 7 days (yesterday and the 6 previous days) and 1 DivX movie of the past day (yesterday).
The Flash movies are the largest in size, averaging 30M (each) in size whereas the DivX movies averages less than 15M in size - same number of pictures, same movie, same resolution, just better compression under DivX.
So, where was I going with all that...
...If you can afford the hard drive space, I recommend one image every minutes to create 'smoother' and interesting image motion.