Cambrosia Webcam Software

In my last column, I began my discussion of webcams by telling you about the hardware and Web server connection requirements. In this article, I’ll tell you about three different software packages you can use to get your webcam online.

The most basic of the three webcam software packages I worked with while researching this article is StripCam, a freeware control strip module by David Van Brink. This program offers an extremely simple interface that you can use to periodically snap and save images either to a local or networked hard disk or a server accessible via FTP.

Installing StripCam is easy. Simply drop the control strip module onto your System folder. When you release the mouse button, your Mac automatically moves the file into the Control Strip Modules folder. Restart your computer to begin using StripCam.

To set up StripCam, use its control strip pop-up menu (see Figure 1) to configure various options. At a minimum, you should set the FTP & File Setup options; these enable you to specify settings for saving the file. Video settings help you fine-tune the image, using options specific to your camera. You can use the Captions options to specify text to appear at the top and bottom of the image, including a title and date and time stamp. Finally, select one of the frequency options to specify how often a snapshot should be taken and saved. It’s that easy.

For a few more features at an affordable price, Oculus is worth looking into. This $20 shareware application, written by Poubelle Software and International Web, offers all the features of StripCam and more.

Oculus includes a Setup Assistant (like the Mac OS Setup Assistant) prompts you for information to set up your camera and build a Web page for your captured images. (More on that later.) This setup process is virtually idiot-proof (if you follow the instructions in the documentation file), making it possible for a complete novice to set up a webcam in minutes.

When you use Oculus, you create an Oculus document, which displays the image that will be saved (see Figure 2). Using options under the Settings menu, you can set the size of the image, customize the video input options, set FTP information, and create captions that can be positioned anywhere on the image. Snapshot triggers can be based on time, movement, or sound, giving you a great deal of flexibility over when a snapshot is saved. When you save the document, all settings are saved with it. By putting the document in your Startup Items folder (inside your System folder), you’re assured that Oculus fires up your webcam every time you start your computer.

Figure 2: An Oculus document window shows the image to be saved, along some other settings.

Oculus also gives you the ability to create QuickTime movies based on snapshots it takes. You can set a wide variety of options, including frequency, frame rate, and compression settings. You can set up Oculus so that it saves your movie to a folder on your hard disk or Web server, then serve up the movie just like any other webcam image. Anyone with QuickTime installed on their computer—even Windows users—will be able to see the movie in their Web browser window.

You can download a copy of Oculus from the International Web Web site, http://www.intlweb.com/. The software you download is fully functional with one exception: until you pay the shareware fee, it will not save your FTP information, requiring you to re-enter it each time you start the program.

SiteCam

Rearden Technology’s SiteCam software goes far beyond the basics. It offers all the features of both StripCam and Oculus, but adds site serving and streaming video capabilities. This means you can use SiteCam without Web server software to serve up webcam images, movies, and live video. Not bad for $149.

Like Oculus, you use SiteCam to create documents that include all settings. A status window displays information about the document and its settings, and you can display a preview window to show the actual snapshot. Since the preview window shows a live view (or pretty close to live, depending on settings), keeping it open can slow the system’s performance, so I recommend leaving it closed.

Figure 3: SiteCam’s status and preview windows.

If you’re interested in steaming video, SiteCam has you covered two ways. You can either use SiteCam’s built in HTTP server or a WebSTAR plug-in compatible server with the SiteCam plug in, which is included with SiteCam. The online documentation provides detailed instructions for setting up streaming video, including tips for limiting access so bandwidth isn’t consumed by streaming video users.

If you’re really into webcams, you should check out Rearden’s SiteZap package. It enables you to put a remote controllable camera on your Web site. Not only can site visitors look through your camera lens, but they can tilt and pan the camera using controls on the webcam’s page. You can see this product in action and download a demo of SiteCam on Readen’s Web site, http://www.rearden.com/.

Creating the HTML Document

In most cases, having software to take and save snapshots isn’t enough to get your webcam online. You also have to create HTML documents to display the images.

All three of the software packages covered in this article include sample Web pages for displaying images. You can copy one of these files to your Web server and modify it to point to your webcam image. As mentioned earlier, Oculus goes a step further by including a Setup Assistant that’ll build the Web page for you based on information you provide (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Oculus’s Setup Assistant can build a very basic webcam Web page based on information you provide.

In most cases, however, you’ll want to build a Web page from scratch. This enables you to match the webcam page’s design with the design of your other pages. If you decide to go this route, there are two lines you may want to include in the META tags at the beginning of the HTML document, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: The source code for the page illustrated in Figure 4.

<meta http-equiv=”Pragma” content=”no-cache”> prevents the Web browser from caching the image.

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”60; URL=webcam.html”> tells the Web browser to refresh the web page every 60 seconds. (Note that you must replace webcam.html with the name of your Web page file.)

Here’s how this works. Say a site visitor opens your webcam Web page and leaves it open on his desktop so he can watch what’s going on. The first tag prevents the image from being cached, ensuring that the visitor always gets a fresh image from the server when the page is reloaded. The second tag tells the Web browser to reload the Web page every 60 seconds, ensuring that the most recent image is always served up.

There’s one thing to keep in mind when using this feature: your Web server software may cache image files, too. If so, it’ll serve up the image in its cache, which may not be the most recently saved image. The only way to prevent this from happening is to change the server’s caching setup; since this can hurt Web server performance, I don’t recommend it.

Putting It All Together

You should now have all the pieces to get your webcam online. The camera takes the pictures and saves them to your Web server. An HTML document residing on your Web server references the picture. When someone visits the page, the latest picture appears.

As you can see, getting a webcam online isn’t difficult. But this article only covered the basics. As you’ll see when you explore your webcam software—especially if you select a full-featured package like SiteCam—there’s more you can do to put pictures of your world online.

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