(Continued — 3)
After trying a few other Mac applications, I settled on CoolCam 1.7 from Evological, which costs about $20. This software allowed me to set up my captioning at bottom of the image, choose a JPEG image quality, and print the date/time. Like WebCam32, CoolCam 1.7 allows you to choose colors and fonts for your captions and to move them around on your image as you want. I’m currently using this with my Power Mac 9500 to serve up my Long Beach "Beach Cam" at 15-minute intervals (since the scene doesn’t change radically that often), pointed out the window.
Obviously, you will have selected a safe place to set up and point
your camera, so if you’re showing a "puppy cam"
in your home, your puppy isn’t going to knock your camera
over and hurt him or herself.
Serving It Up
The final step, in almost all cases, is to build a page on your
Web site. Assume when you’ve set-up your WebCam software,
and set the path for the application to upload your images, you
will have set a name such as "myscene.jpg." You now
need to create an HTML page that calls that image, like <IMG
SRC="/url/ myscene.jpg"> so that you can point somebody
to a page on the Internet.
What’s happening here is that the WebCam is seeing a scene
through its video sensor, the WebCam software is "grabbing"
a frame from that live scene, then compressing that frame as a
JPEG, naming the image ("myscene.jpg"), then uploading
that image to your Web space via FTP through your ISP connection.
You then view the image over the Internet on the page you’ve
built, which has the image loaded within it.
Depending on how often you update your image, you may want to
create a META refresh tag for the page, which causes it to reload
in the browser every x-number of seconds. This is because the
image won’t update itself on your Web page unless you’ve
used some kind of JavaScript applet or other utility that may
have come with your WebCam application in order to serve "streaming
video."
An example of the META refresh tag is this, where content="nn"
is the number of seconds before the page reloads: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
CONTENT=15>. This snippet goes in the top of your HTML page
between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags.
While this is a fairly rudimentary introduction to how to set
up your own WebCam, it should nevertheless point you in the right
direction for opening a window to your world onto the Internet.
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