Camilogical, my friends…

Recently, I was digging around in my closet and found my old Veo Stingray webcam. After much haggling with Windows XP, USB drivers, and various webcam softwares, I finally got the blasted thing working.

From now on, my most recent webcam thumbnail will be displayed in the “currents” section of the right-hand sidebar, along with a link to the cam page, proper. The cam page will display the most current image on appropriate refresh (currently, 30 seconds. Though I may up it, later). If you click the image on the main cam page, you will be able to view a live stream (well, approximately 1.5 frames per second, at any rate). This eats up bandwith for me, and I may turn this option off, as I see fit.

So.. how am I doing all of this (as it will be a bit until I get around to updating the “about the site” section)? Webcam32. Webcam32 captures the image, processes it, uploads it via FTP to the server, and then counts down until the next capture moment (every 30 seconds, currently).

On the cam.php page, I use an iframe that is just large enough for the image, and refreshes every 30 seconds. (The html page within the iframe contains nothing but the image tag for the cam.jpg file, wrapped with an href link to the streaming page.)

On the streaming page (again in an iframe via cam.php), I use client pull technology via javascript, to get the images from Webcam32 (which has a server built in, for this purpose). The actual link the javascript is calling is http://fyre.is-a-geek.net:8888/video/pull?, which triggers webcam32 to send an image. In fact, clicking that link will get you an immediate image capture, assuming that the camera is online.

I normally have the camera on while I’m sitting at my PC, working. Most of the time, I look goofy as hell, and you’ll often see me with weird hats, or mardi gras beads, or stuffed animals, etc…

If you’re watching the cam, and see a cool image, e-mail it to me.

No comments.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.