Thinking about Webcams

[robynfali]

Ok, mate of mine had an attempted break in his garage over the weekend, the guy has a quad bike, gasgas trials bike, plus a full snapon tool chest, so he has bought himself a CCTV camera set up, which will be setting up during the week.

This has got me thinking about one for the website, this is the camera he bought

ebay link

Now if I buy that, plus this card

card link

Is that enough to do a webcam feed for the website, have NEVER done anything like this before, so please bear with me

[beteljuice]

You can get that kind of camera cheaper than that. - Care, they are not truly 'weather proof'.

Again the capture cards or USB dongles you can get cheaper. They are rather CPU resource hungry.

But then again you could hang almost any CCTVs off it and have motion detection, alarm notification (by SMS / email etc. etc.)

If all you want is to look out of the window, then a USB cam and something like YAWCAM (free) software.

[robynfali]

Hi mate

I know about Yawcam, been messing about with that with my USB camera, my problem is, i cannot use a usb camera pointing ou the window, because my windows face the directions that the sun rises and sets, i was thinking of setting one up on the chimney preferably wireless, and all I want it to do is to plug into the pc, into yawcam....thats all, but I am a newbie when it comes to viewing cameras, as you say, as cheap as possible preferably.

I didnt realise that card would be resource hungry, the pc running cumulus is almost useless, very low power, so thats that idea out the window

[Gina]

Video processing is very resource hungry. Any video processing. CCTV cameras use the PAL 625 line TV system in the UK whatever resolution they may have. This is so that they can use standard TV sets as monitors. OTOH webcams often run at much lower frame rates and sometimes lower resolution so can use fewer resources.

[robschonk]

I've got a USB webcam pointed out a window facing NNW, and it works great. Upload to WU, and it doesn't cost anything to get online:

http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/rob ... /show.html

Yawcam has a motion detector feature, so if you want to use it for security, you can program it for motion detection to do things like record a video, send an email, play a .wav file (dog barking, shotgun loading, etc. ) or run a .exe program.

Another good alternative would be a Foscam:

http://foscam.us/foscam-fi8908w-wireles ... 7Aod1FTKsw

This can be used either wireless, through your router, or plugged into your network. It allows you to control it from your computer to pan around. Also has a motion sensor mode. It's an indoor camera, but I think this housing would work:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... K:MEWAX:IT

Rob

[robynfali]

Thanks for the feedback peeps, given me some food for thought, also some for my mate too, thankfully they didn't get any of the gear, the quad bike is his daughters, the gasgas bike is up on ebay for sale. So many thanks to all

[hills]

I use USB cameras, one for security over the front door and one on the roof in a weather proof housing, both using Yawcam. I just use a 5m and 10m USB cable.

Yawcam does everything great except for one problem. If I leave the security camera on auto adjust for contrast, it often take pictures when no one is there and if I leave it on manual adjust it is either completely washed out in the middle of the day or dark in the morning.

There are no problems with the weather cam on the roof though. I even use the motion detection over night to capture lightning, although again I think the auto contrast stops me from getting perfect pictures.