WebCam how-to

I've had some email asking how I'm doing the streaming webcam. It's easy and free!

First, download Windows Media Player Encoder 9. It works with pretty much any web cam -- I have one called the Veo Stingray which I literally picked by going to Fry's and buying the absolute cheapest one I could find ($15).

You have the option of streaming directly from your computer or "pushing" the stream to a server, which is what I'm doing -- although for most folks without a free Windows Media Server, this isn't a great option ;-)

Next, you just need to embed the player onto your webpage, using script like what you can find here (this is good because it helps you work with browsers other than IE on Windows -- my wife uses Safari for Mac, for instance, and it works fine there, too!)

For the non-streaming webcam, I wrote my own software for that in C# -- it just grabs a picture every 15 seconds, draws the caption and date, and pops it up to an FTP server. I'm not really ready to "share" that program ... but WebCam32 is a good option, if you don't want to write something yourself.