Webcam Servers

[gee-bee]

Hi All,

I'm just entering my second week of Cumulus, having only moved my weather station outside las Saturday.

I have a question regarding streaming live images from my webcam. Can anyone recommend a service that will allow you to embed a live webcam stream into a webpage?

Regards,
Gee

[TNETWeather]

A lot depends on what type of camera you are using and what software.

I use a software package called Active WebCam, which allows me to grab the stream directly from my workstation in my office and embed it on my web pages. Works with a number of camera types.

To put it on a web page, I just use an iframe like:

Code: Select all

<iframe src="http://192.168.1.12:8080" title="Camera1"
width="320" height="240" frameborder="0" scrolling="no">
</iframe>

Obviously with an IP or URL that goes somewhere. That one is for an inside network link.

[daj]

Kevin

What kind of bandwidth does this consume -- how often are you streaming? 24/7?

[TNETWeather]

Primarily I am doing it internal, but did the same for a weather cam for several years.

You can do it several ways. One is the way that I showed which is setup to do 6 or 10 frames a minute which is not very much, the link points to a java based web server.

You can also set it up to upload an image via FTP to the remote server and then use a javascript script to look at the images like you would any normal updated image.

And they also offer a remote server based thing but that cost money.

The software comes with several ways to do it. I didn't like their frame page as I just wanted the image itself, so I hacked their scripts a bit to just do that.

The camera I have on it now is a Logitech Pro 9000, but I've had some CCTV stuff connected to it as well. Pointed at the pool area when they were building it 4 or so years ago.

It can support a number of different cameras at the same time. I had 5 going at one time. beats up the box a bit, so if you want to do that, you might want to look at a dedicated box.

I have unlimited bandwidth so that was not an issue either, but with the current 6-10 frames per minute it is not very bad and the effect on the viewers side is moving enough.

[TNETWeather]

Oh... times... I had a script that turned it off on the website after dusk and turned it back on at dawn.

I never played with making movies out of it though.

[akasonny]

I just poke this into the .htm file from my Trendnet cams. They're configured at 25fps


<!--Video-->
<div align="left"><font color="blue"><b>sky cam</b></div>
<TABLE>
<applet name="cvcs" codebase="http://70.162.177.193:81/" code="xplug.class" align="left" vspace="10" hspace="20" width="320" height="240">
<param name="RemotePort" value="81">
<param name="Timeout" value="5000">
<param name="RotateAngle" value="0">
<param name="PreviewFrameRate" value="2">
<param name="DeviceSerialNo" value="">
</applet>
<font face="sans serif" color="blue" size="2"><b>
<applet name="cvcs" codebase="http://70.162.177.193:89/" code="xplug.class" align="justify" hspace="20" vspace="10" width="320" height="240">
<param name="RemotePort" value="89">
<param name="Timeout" value="5000">
<param name="RotateAngle" value="0">
<param name="PreviewFrameRate" value="2">
<param name="DeviceSerialNo" value="">
</applet>
</TABLE>

It gobbles up some bandwidth but...

[TNETWeather]

I was wrong about the 6fpm... It is actually set to 1fps, but is configurable to just about anything you want including insane numbers.

[TNETWeather]

I just poke this into the .htm file from my Trendnet cams. They're configured at 25fps

Code: Select all

<!--Video--> 
<div align="left"><font color="blue"><b>sky cam</b></div>
<TABLE>
<applet name="cvcs" codebase="http://70.162.177.193:81/" code="xplug.class" align="left" vspace="10" hspace="20" width="320" height="240">
                      <param name="RemotePort" value="81">
                      <param name="Timeout" value="5000">
                      <param name="RotateAngle" value="0">
                      <param name="PreviewFrameRate" value="2">
                      <param name="DeviceSerialNo" value="">
</applet>
<font face="sans serif" color="blue" size="2"><b>
<applet name="cvcs" codebase="http://70.162.177.193:89/" code="xplug.class" align="justify" hspace="20" vspace="10" width="320" height="240">
                      <param name="RemotePort" value="89">
                      <param name="Timeout" value="5000">
                      <param name="RotateAngle" value="0">
                      <param name="PreviewFrameRate" value="2">
                      <param name="DeviceSerialNo" value="">
</applet>
</TABLE>

It gobbles up some bandwidth but...

Not sure why you have the table in there. You have no table elements in the table.

The following does about the same thing, but centers the text for each cam above the related video box.

Code: Select all

<!--Video-->
<div style="margin:0 auto; color: #0000ff; font-size: 130%;">
    <div style="float: left; text-align: center;">
    sky cam<br>
    <applet name="cvcs" codebase="http://70.162.177.193:81/" 
        code="xplug.class" width="320" height="240">
        <param name="RemotePort" value="81">
        <param name="Timeout" value="5000">
        <param name="RotateAngle" value="0">
        <param name="PreviewFrameRate" value="2">
        <param name="DeviceSerialNo" value="">
    </applet>
    </div>

    <div style="float: right; text-align: center;">
    terra cam<br>
    <applet name="cvcs" codebase="http://70.162.177.193:89/" 
        code="xplug.class" width="320" height="240">
        <param name="RemotePort" value="89">
        <param name="Timeout" value="5000">
        <param name="RotateAngle" value="0">
        <param name="PreviewFrameRate" value="2">
        <param name="DeviceSerialNo" value="">
    </applet>
    </div>
    <br clear="all">
</div>
<!--End Of Video-->

Attached is the output. Just messin with the code.

[akasonny]

Thanks for the quick-fix, Kevin.

The "table" references were just remnants of something else I was trying and I forgot to remove them.

My basic point was the premise of just how easy adding live cams can be providing the cams are IP and have an addressable address.

Now programming a user-interface, with limits, so they can be moved around...that's the hard part.

[Gina]

I sample my weathercam every 5 mins and FTP the image to my web site. You can set the page to resend every so many mins to match the upload. The webcam covers mostly sky but some ground to show visibility etc. http://ginad.org.uk/weather/Webcam.html

[Hillbilly]

I'd like to set up a webcam but I don't know much about them. Luckily I found this thread as a starter. I'll need one that will be indoors, but will have to be upstairs and my weather station console and computer is downstairs. So presume I need a wireless one with an IP address.....Gina, being UK based, where did you get yours from and what sort of price would I need to pay?

I wanted to be able to use my own page rather than others that I have seen which display in a pre-built manufacturer's page, so these look good. From what I can (barely) understand, the alternatives shown here seem to be either to have the image embedded directly into a web page, or to transfer an image from somewhere else via ftp. Are their any pros and cons to either of these methods?

Your page looks closest to what I would like to do Gina. Can you give me a few more pointers on what I would need to do to extract the image and upload via ftp? It's outside my knowledge.

[TNETWeather]

Depends on what you are attempting to accomplish.

To many, a webcam page displays a "moving" webcam image, meaning you can see changes to the image in a short period of time. To do that, you need to embed the image and have the source updated fairly regular (once a second, several times a minute...). So you can see the wind blow so to speak.

Others, just want to show a recap image which is what Gina is doing.

Bandwith for the former is much higher and can be influenced by the number of visitors that are looking at the page at the moment. 1-5 is not much, but 300 visitors at the same time might make a bit of a difference to your sites performance and might even hit your workstation as well.

The latter is simpler to setup and use and gives a snap show of what things looked like when it was taken.

[Hillbilly]

Thanks Kevin, that's really clear. I'm unlikely to have more than 1-5 people on the site an any one time so looks like I could use either method - although simpler is always more attractive!

To use the former method, I could use code along the lines of what has been shown in the post then? If we want to show our bird feeding station in the pic too, I guess a sense of movement would be nice. Do you recommend any particular webcam?

I'd still like to understand Gina's method too so I can decide, so hopefully she will be along at some point.

[nking]

You might like to take a look at this site http://www.yawcam.com/. I haven't yet put it through its paces but it may be what you're looking for

[Gina]

Hi Helen

Love your web site, very pleasant to look at Also, nice to see another lady on here

The webcam I'm using is nothing special though a bit above the most basic. Note that it is NOT a wireless one. I bought it from Maplin some time back. This is it :- http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=228786 I thought they'd discontinued it but I was wrong. I bought that model because it works well in low light (even without the led lights) has reasonable resolution and is fairly small. Also, they said it didn't need drivers as it was standard USB. And contrary to what they are saying on that page now, it DOES work with Linux (edit - I see they've taken that off now). Amazon.co.uk seem to do very similar ones much cheaper eg. http://www.amazon.co.uk/MiniGadget-Nigh ... 26&sr=1-34 I don't know what the performance of that one is actually like, but the spec looks similar. Different make on it - mine was Sweex.

The software I'm using is Linux based and called simply webcam. It captures images from the webcam and uses FTP to upload them to a web site as a JPG image. You can set the resolution and capture rate etc. and specify the FTP server particulars, in a setup file, in plain text. On the server you have an image folder/directory where the image file is uploaded and supply a simple web page containing that image. Two extra lines of HTML code tell the client's web browser to refresh the page - so that the webcam is automatically refreshed.

Here is the HTML code for the webcam page :-

Code: Select all

<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type">
<title>Webcam</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="120">
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://ginad.org.uk/weathergd/normal.css" type="text/css">
</head>
<body style="background-image: url(../../weathergd/images/BlackdownHills.JPG);">
<h1>Blackdown Hills Weathercam</h1>
<h2>View across the Otter Valley looking South -&nbsp;updates every 5 minutes</h2>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<img style="width: 640px; height: 480px;" alt="Weathercam" src="images/webcam.jpeg"><br>
<br>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Although I use Linux (currently Ubuntu v8.10 for the webcam) I would think there's Windows software that would do much the same thing.

I have the webcam mounted in a waterproof box with a perspex window for the webcam lens, on the outside of the wall about 7ft up under the eaves but not so close as to obscure the sky. This is a bungalow and we don't have an upstairs. The webcam is connected by USB cable directly to the computer. I'm planning to add all this info to my weather web site in due course together with the location and altitude plus the various modifications I have made to the weather station sensors.

That's about all I can think of at present but I'm happy to answer any questions