Your Own Webcam
by Gerrit Dalman
Perhaps you have a beautiful view you want to share. Maybe you have a pet you would like to check on from work or when on vacation. Or it could be that you want people to see your own work or living space. Whatever your intentions, you need four things to setup your own webcam:
1. A camera
2. Software
3. A computer
4. Internet hosting
The first thing you need is a camera. Your selection will depend on the quality of the image you want to share. Look for things like frame rate and resolution. Find a review and look for sample images from the camera to make sure they meet your expectations; don't trust pictures on the packaging.
Do look on the box for QuickTime compatibility, since that will almost guarantee compatibility with most Mac OS software. This should include everything from the dime-a-dozen low-quality webcams to high end DV camcorders. Personally, I recommend Apple's own iSight. It's a great balance of quality and affordability with great video and still capture.
Once you've picked out a camera you have to position it, mount it, and connect it. Since most webcams are meant to sit on monitors, you may have to get creative with mounting. The key is to make sure your subject is lit, your perspective is interesting, and your camera is protected from the elements. This can be accomplished by any number of cases and mounts available through special dealers such as WebCamStore.
After the camera, you need to select software that meets your needs. There are really two kinds of webcam services you can offer: streaming video or refreshing stills. Though video is more interesting for an active subject, still image webcams are more common, more accessible, and require less processing power.
If all you want is a regularly updated still image, you can look to Econ Technologies' ImageCaster ($30). It offers fantastic overlays for branding, captioning, or time stamping the images and robust scheduling options for controlling availability and frequency of updates.
These and other advanced features like motion detection for any camera really make this software a prime candidate for any webcam, but its big feature is hosting of JAVA-accessible video streams which can be served locally or embedded into any web page. Producing a decent result on the other end is resource-intensive though, so select a computer accordingly.
The Mac will pass the images from your camera to the internet. While you need to meet the requirements of the camera and software, it certainly doesn't need to be new or top of the line.
That is important because dedicating a single computer to manage your webcam at all times is ideal - especially if you want to offer the more resource demanding video stream. Your primary computer is probably capable of multi-tasking, but you will loose system resources for other tasks and the quality and availability of your webcam will suffer as work, restarts, and sleep affect your webcam software. So having a second system to dedicate to the task will serve you best.
Both programs I've mentioned can host the images locally, but that can make them hard to access - especially if you use a router, firewall, or wireless network. Configuring your software to send the visuals to a home elsewhere on the internet in the form of both storage space and an address is a good idea.
The simplest solution is posting to an iDisk for access through a .Mac HomePage, but any web space you have will work. You can even register a domain name like GerritDalmansGreatWebcam.org and use URL forwarding to point it to your space so people don't have to remember a complicated address to find your contribution to the web.
But what's the point of a webcam without viewers? I recommend submitting it to the EarthCam network, an online directory of webcams, to really get the word out!
I know this has been a broad overview of a complicated topic, so feel free to email me with questions. Just remember that there's a wide gulf between hideous webcams that sit on PC monitors and big-business streaming video solutions, but with the right products it's easy to get in the upper end of that spectrum without going broke.