[sclug] Security cameras/Web Cams

[Bob Franklin]

On Sun, 8 May 2005, Alan Pope wrote:

> ...
>
> I've got a Philips Toucam 740K webcam which works under Ubuntu using 
> camstream or webcam (another bit of webcam software). I've never used 
> motion but understand it works as designed.

I don't know if there is another driver for this, but the PWC driver for 
these webcams (made by Philips and rebadged by other companies, including 
Logitech) was discontinued - see http://www.smcc.demon.nl/webcam/

This was annoying to me as I had 3 of these over time (one Philips and two 
different Logitechs).  The driver still works fine and you can download 
the source to merge into your own kernel.  However, the code was removed 
from the vanilla 2.6 source at some point around 2.6.6 (approx.) and made 
quite an interesting discussion about Open Source idealism.  If you're 
interested, the relevant links are on the above page.

This driver works fine and I used it for my home webcam without trouble on 
a 2.6 kernel (compiled myself, running SuSE 9.1 Pro).  I use 'camsrv' to 
take a picture and upload it, each minute.

I'm not sure about using one as a 'security camera'; you could mess about 
with masks an motion detection, but it might be easier to upload/save an 
image based on the hour/minute/second and so you have the past 24 hours 
saved somewhere.  (You can merge them together into a movie to create some 
good time-lapse videos, too; I never new the goings ons in my street were 
so interesting!)

   - Bob


-- 
  Bob Franklin <r.c.franklin at reading.ac.uk>          +44 (0)118 378 7147
  Systems and Communications, IT Services, The University of Reading, UK