movies from other webcams

[hills]

I though you fellow webcamers might find this useful.

I found this great little utility and set it up to collect images from other webcams around Adelaide so that I can make a movie from them:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/seqdownload.html

It took about 5 minutes to install and configure to collect the images. I'm now collecting images from a SA Gov webcam at outer harbour which will show the ships coming and going. I'll post it up after I've collected a days worth.

[uncle_bob]

Looking forward to see this in action.

[hills]

Here's what I've caught from a couple of DTEI webcams. Click on the image to view the vid.

In the first you can see a ship leave, which disappears to the right of screen then re-enters and goes from right to left and then the second is from another webcam and you can see the same ship go across the screen.

Might not want to view if you have a slow link. As they're not my webcams I can't reduce the quality of the images, so they're pretty big. sorry 'bout that.

[hills]

I've been playing around with this a bit lately and this is what I've set up now.

I have seqdownload (http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/seqdownload.html) automatically going to a couple of DTEI webcam sites every pre-set interval and getting the latest image. This software automatically checks the latest image is different to the last one downloaded and only downloads it if it is.

I then have Fling file software (http://www.nchsoftware.com/ftp/index.html) checking my local folder and if any files have been added it automatically uploads them to my website. This costs $34US, but at this stage I'm just using the 30 day trial to see if it does what I want.

I have then set up a web page that displays the latest image

I have put an option on that webpage to replay the last 24 hours. This uses the same XMLSWF slideshow software that my webcam page uses to automatically create a slide show from what ever images are there at the time. I have also included a small piece of PHP script to first delete any images in that directory that are over 24 hours old. This way every time the page is accessed it performs housekeeping for me

Here are my pages, but be aware each image is about 100k as I have to download them as they are.

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~storerfa ... bstat.html
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~storerfa ... hstat.html

If this proves to be more reliable than yawcam in uploading images, I think I'll convert my webcam to use this as well and just get yawcam to load the files to the local directory.

[slashmusic]

For all those people who are owning a webcam and ftp_ing their snapshots frequently to their Webserver it does not make sense to download the images back from their Webserver to make a movie. (using seqdownload)
They can save each webcam image locally before it is being uploaded to their webserver and once a day, the can use this little freeware utility to create a movie from all these local stored webcam snapshots.
this util is called: Images2video and it is free: http://en.cze.cz/Images-to-video

I am creating once a day 2 different movies of my webcam snapshots. One is in HTML5 (webm format) and can only be viewed with Google Chrome so far and the other one is in compatibillity mode for IE and firefox using flv format.
the advantage of Images2video is, it is completely scriptable so you can create a sheduler entry starting this tool with a config file.
After both video's are created I am using a batch job to put these files automatically to my webserver.
the result can be viewed here:
WEBM format: http://jankreutzer.de/index.php/webcam/ ... zeitraffer (for Google Chorme)
http://jankreutzer.de/index.php/webcam/ ... -motion-ie

-jan

[hills]

excellent, thanks for that, I'll take a look.

Luckily for me downloads from my webspace are in my freezone, so I don't have to pay for downloading them again and I wanted to always be able to see the most recent images.

But that said I like your idea and will check it out, thanks.

[slashmusic]

Luckily for me downloads from my webspace are in my freezone, so I don't have to pay for downloading them again and I wanted to always be able to see the most recent images.
But that said I like your idea and will check it out, thanks.

Hills, I also don't have to pay for upload/download to my webspace, I think 10 GB traffic (U/Dload is free for me, but let me explain how my webcam is working.
My webcam is taking one Picture per Minute and upload this Picture to my Webspace.
Every 5 minutes, one picture is additionally stored also locally on my computer.
so on my webspace, you should always see a picture which is not older than 1 minute and locally, at the end of day if have several pictures made - frequently stored every 5 minutes. I'll take these hundrets of pictures an generate the movie. Once it has been generated I upload only the movie to my webspace. In this case, I don't need to download hundreds of pictures back to my local computer.

But anyway's I thhink, I generate a 60 second movie from pictures which are made every 5 minutes and it looks smooth. I don't think it is necesarry to make pictures more often for a movie........but check it out by yourself.

-jan

[hills]

Thanks Jan, sounds like a good method,

[hills]

For all those people who are owning a webcam and ftp_ing their snapshots frequently to their Webserver it does not make sense to download the images back from their Webserver to make a movie. (using seqdownload)

I should just clarify, I don't use seqdownload to download my own images, just images from other webcams. You're right that wouldn't make sense at all!

[TimeScience]

If anyone wants to record instant time-lapse from a webcam without having to sort out how to do it yourself, we offer a paid online service for that.
http://timecam.tv

Even if you aren't interested in paying for timelapse, you might enjoy browsing the cameras. They are fun to watch.