Make your own webcam

Make your own webcam These days, web cameras are everywhere. I have friends, maybe your office or university, you study too much. So, you finally decided to go with the crowd and a camera. Now you have at home and connected to your computer, you probably ask: "How am I doing, what a picture online?" We are here to explain. Create your own web camera is easy: all you need is a computer, cam, webcam software, transmission, and an Inteet connection. Streaming Video vs. Photos The first decision you need to pass before the camera is alive, if they show streaming video or photos. If you have visited a webcam directory OnlineCamera.com and looked like a few curves, you probably noticed that some of them show a continuous stream of live video, while others update the page in the browser and displays a different image on a predetermined interval of time . The first variant, the stream will no doubt be more interesting to an audience, but you can own a camera? If you have a broadband Inteet connection, and you can afford that, a lot of bandwidth for the car to get there, the answer is yes. Otherwise, it prefers to stay with the camera - which will make the process easier for you and your camera, viewers, and such a connection can be without problems, even if you access the network via a dial-up. This will give you the opportunity to show the world images with higher image quality - and without grains larger - even if the images are not moved as on television. It 'also important, the size of the images from your webcam, the largest image, the lower the refresh rate. An image of 640x480 pixels can be searched, but can be big problems for users with slow Inteet connections, especially if the frame of the machine is at an interval of 3 seconds. Take a look at the possibility of transmission of the software that came with your webcam, and think about how the various options that would have to look the other computer. If you have friends and relatives who live far away from you with access to the Inteet, you can use to test your camera. Set to various combinations of size and refresh rates, and ask them to contact them and tell you how it seems. This way you can have fun with the camera, even before you show it to the public. You can experiment with humans, keep the following tips: a reasonable size 320x240 pixels can be updated after every 20-30 seconds. If you want the picture to update more frequently, try using the image size of 160x120 pixels. Using this you can update rates up to 10 seconds. If streaming live video, try an image size of 160x120 so slow Inteet connections can smooth your webcam. Methods of achieving the Webcam Shots client pull this method is the most popular to show only snapshots from webcam. And 'the easy way, what works and dial-up Inteet connections. It is also not much of the bandwidth of the connection, so you'll still be able to surf the Inteet, e-mail, and other things while your webcam snaps photos. But you will not be able to live video feeds with this method. This method is usually with the help of an FTP connection that sends the last shot of the webcam on the site that hosts your web pages. Server-Push This is the way of resources, and therefore less used. You should use if you want to stream live video from CAM viewers. It has its limitations, some of which are: * It requires a broadband connection. * You must be a limit to the video stream for each user to connect to her. * You can not be a dial-up connection for this method. * If there is a firewall on your network so you can Disallow use this method, or you can in one way or another. * Only the most recent browser versions support server push. In order to push a Webcam server, you must have a fixed IP (dynamic IP's are also possible, but you need more resources) and server push software. How to view the images once you have decided what kind of webcam you are setting, you must decide how to update the image. To send the last recording by the camera, your visit will be charged again (usually by pressing the F5 key on your keyboard), unless some additional HTML, Javascript code or Java applets, which auto refresh the image, after a certain period of time, you can define. (This does not apply to the server push method, since it is continuously streaming a video feed). META Tag Command Even if this is the oldest method of modification of a webcam image on a Web page, is in many places, and works perfectly. This type of update is done via a 'code of HTML. This is an HTML tag, when a page to reload automatically after a certain period of time (in seconds) is reached. The syntax of this tag is as follows: <<HEAD> META HTTP-EQUIV = REFRESH CONTENT = "seconds"> </ HEAD> In the interval in seconds, the browser loads the page, and not again and again until the user closes. The main disadvantage of this method is that the entire page is reloaded, so that a graphics heavy site is a pain to load on slow connections and leads to high bandwidth. If you choose this method of refreshing the image, remember that some older browsers may not be the image updates automatically after a few loads. For this error, add the following code on your page's head tag: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Tue, 01 January 1980 1:00:00 GMT"> <META HTTP -- EQUIV = "Pragma" content = "no-cache"> Refresh JavaScript If you do not want your audience to wait until the entire HTML page for the update, you can use JavaScript to update only the image. Please note that visitors to your webcam to activate JavaScript to see the image changing (nowadays, 90% of the public shall have Javascript enabled). Java applets Java applets are small programs embedded in a Web page that loads the webcam images are free to form and the browser of jobs. There are hundreds of Java applets for this purpose available on-line, as the camera online Java viewer. You can use your webcam across the page and update the image of you, without refreshing the entire page, only the image. Stay with us for more in upcoming parts of this tutorial. The author? 2005 OnlineCamera.com, All rights reserved. Silvina Georgieva is Managing Director of OnlineCamera.com. Founded in 1996, the Chamber Online is the first independent webcam directory on the Inteet. He has more than 3,000 sites currently, and growing every day. Contact: