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OOH! Might help me get mine out from its box andd install! Help needed also please 
Posted: 17:10 Aug 20 2002
Webcam help needed
Can someone tell me how I go about setting up my webcam to run off my website? Ta in advance
3 Replies and 796 Views in Total.
Posted: 17:10 Aug 20 2002 
This is going to be a bit generic & vague due to the nature of the problem, too many different ways of doing this, let me know if there are any specifics you want details on.
Assuming you've got the webcam working on your computer -- the software which comes with the cam should display the camera's picture on the screen and let you wave at yourself & stuff -- the tricky bit is getting the picture off your screen and onto your website.
This is generally accomplished using FTP (File Transfer Protocol (or Program, depending on blah... )) which lets you copy files from one computer to another -- you probably used an FTP application to copy your webpages from your home PC to your ISP's webserver.
Many webcams come with software to let you FTP the pictures to your website, but the programs which come with the cams are generally rather limited -- you're often much better off using one of the many webcam programs downloadable freely or for limited cost from the web (or check out the cover CDs on many PC magazines). Probably the most popular ones are webcam32 (guess the URL) or spycam (google, URL isn't guessable); you may wish to try looking at zdnet (guess the URL) as their download site has a lot of webcam software.
Once you've got the software and installed you'll be able to automatically send the pictures from your cam to your website, the next thing is the web page to display the webcam picture.
The key thing you need to do is get the image on the web page refreshed each time you send a new picture to your website -- the simplest way to do this is to use an html tag:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">
this will cause the web page to automatically be reloaded every 30 seconds.
So if you're sending a picture to your website once a minute, calling it image.jpg and putting it in a directory called pics, your web page may look like:
<html>
<head>
<title>My WebCam</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60">
</head>
<body>
<img src="pics/image.jpg">
</body>
</html>
A masterpiece of minimalism (I wonder if T21 escapes all those tags?)
All this assumes that you're dialing up to an ISP, if you've got an always on connection and/or host your own website it's vastly simpler.
Posted: 18:08 Aug 20 2002