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| Thread ID: 78949 | 2007-05-03 05:47:00 | Linux webcam - How hard is this? | personthingy (1670) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 546639 | 2007-05-03 05:47:00 | I have a TV card with vid in, in the form of a small RCA socket, and a camera that looks over my main door. I also of course have a home web-server running apache on etch The question is how hard would it be to get it so that a fairly standard web cam could be set up, allowing anyone in the house, or outside of the house to go to something like www.mydomain/maindoorcam and see who is at the door? How demanding would it be? server is a secondhand P3 running (by memory) at 900Mhz with 256Mb of RAM, and anything that might make it work harder than a low usage web-server is expected to is in the not possible bin. |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 546640 | 2007-05-03 05:59:00 | for a start... (www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&q=linux+webcam+howto&btnG=Google+Search&meta=) | Graham L (2) | ||
| 546641 | 2007-05-03 06:08:00 | Yip.... that was scary, and what really got me was that just about everything there assumed a USB type webcam, rather than a camera that has an RCA plug hanging off a TV card. I would have assumed what i had would have been easier /me lost, and not afraid to admit it. |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 546642 | 2007-05-03 06:16:00 | I think you'll be best to use a simple USB webcam . A CCD video camera and video card means you would be doing a web television implementation . That's going to be very resource-hungry . The webcam will have a few hundred kilobytes per frame, then it will be compressed quite nicely . You don't need full moving pictures . . . just recognisable images . |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 546643 | 2007-05-03 06:19:00 | I read an interesting article a year ago about a guy who had a similar set up with his Mac in the UK and to cut a long story short- he got video footage of the burglar nicking stuff with a nice pic of his face looking at the camera( the burglar didn't know the computer was switched on) try this link its not Linux, but it might help. www.100share.com |
winmacguy (3367) | ||
| 546644 | 2007-05-03 06:27:00 | True.... All i need from this is to be able to see who is at the door, not exactly what they are doing any specific millisecond I was thinking of having a page that reloads, and therefore offers refreshed image every few seconds rather than several images per second! Perhaps the camera, that is already in place might be better employed elsewhere? I had this idea that the card could be trained to only save a new jpg (or whatever) every few seconds from the CCTV cams stream..... It seems i may have to rethink this. |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 546645 | 2007-05-03 06:32:00 | The problem with the full video is that you have to cope with the camera output all the time, even if you are selecting a few frames every few seconds. The software to handle that is likely to be big and running all the time, because it has to keep synchronism to capture the frame stream. The disk space used might be fairly large, too. The USB web camera takes a picture when you tell it to. That's very simple. | Graham L (2) | ||
| 546646 | 2007-05-03 06:39:00 | OK... next question......... What might be a good cam to use for this? The door is well lit by the large streetlight of a main road almost directly beside it, and the only other concerns are size and price.. In other words a small black camera that was less than $50 is a far better option than most i could think of. Also, there would be about 15 meters of cable. Any reason not to use some of the cat5 scrap i have to extend the USB cord on the cam? |
personthingy (1670) | ||
| 546647 | 2007-05-03 06:49:00 | USB does require USB cable, and it's supposed to be 5m max. There are USB/catX converter modules available, to get up to 50m or so, but they might be expensive. Can you find an old webcam with a serial connector? I think they were around before there was USB. ;) The image sensors are pretty sensitive ... but isn't your visitor facing away from the street lights? |
Graham L (2) | ||
| 546648 | 2007-05-03 07:23:00 | The only problem with back lighting is it won't show the persons face. You could try a wireless streaming camera at the door to save on cables that is activated by a motion sensor connected to a light so that it only comes on and lights the person when they are standing there. It can then provide secure footage to a backup server if needed. | winmacguy (3367) | ||
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