Webcam as Weather Cam - Timed Shot Software

[czenzel]

Hi everyone,

I recently started looking into turning a web camera into a weather camera inside my house.

Can anybody recommend a software package (free or under $30) that I can get timed-based shots from the camera? My goal is to have a picture taken and upload it to my other machine via FTP or run a scheduled script to use SSH (SCP) to upload it to my server.

I have tried the Windows XP Powertoy (Timershot from Microsoft) and I had success with it, but I would like something that works with Vista as well. There was one Java software package I tried but I had little success with it (camera picture flickered too much).

The web camera I got was the Microsoft LifeCam VX-5000.

Thanks,
Christopher Zenzel

 

[Skip Talbot]

Try this one...

http://www.yawcam.com/

 

[Dan Robinson]

Another vote for Yawcam. Free and lots of features, I've run as many as three cameras in different locations with it. It's a java app though, so it's an inefficient resource hog. If you're running it on an older machine, you can't do anything else at the same time.

 

[Darren Addy]

Flix isn't free, but $10 is cheap enough (shareware). You'll have a light watermark until you register.

Doesn't apply to the original questioner, but if you are a Logitech webcam (Vista) user you might want to play with a couple of free utilities from Logitech. It sounds like one of them might do time-lapse capture (at the very bottom of this page). Not sure what they mean by "time-delay recording function" to turn a web cam into a security cam.

 

[czenzel]

Thanks everyone for your input...

I think I am going to try YawCam. It seems that the latest Java update does cause flickers in the Camera Images. In their forums there is a way to fix it by updating a library. So I'll give it another try tonight.

Does anybody here also upload to Weather Underground (FTP) for Weather Cam Images?