If I had to come up with a list of silly things to do on the Internet, Web cams would rank near the top. Come on, now -- who really wants to see minute-by-minute shots of your office, your living room, your cat, your guppies or the inside of your fridge?
Which goes to show how much I know. Thousands of otherwise sane people have succumbed to the exhibitionist lurking inside and set up Web cams in their living rooms, bedrooms and offices. They poke Web cams out of windows to gather the sunrise or just watch the grass grow.
Likewise, millions of Web surfers have succumbed to the voyeur within, because somebody is certainly visiting all those Web cam sites. A few of those sites, such as the famous Jennicam -- which broadcasts the daily life of a young woman with no discernible inhibitions -- have become Web landmarks (www.jennicam.com).
In the interest of scientific research, I decided to see just how hard it is to set up a Web cam, and now I understand why so many people do it. The whole process took about an hour, and it would have taken half that long if I'd bothered to read the instructions.
A basic Web cam is a simple affair. You start by creating a Web page that contains a photograph generated by a video camera hooked to your computer. With software downloaded from the Web, you can snap a new photo as often as you like and upload it to your Web site, where it replaces the previous picture. That way, every time a visitor clicks on the Web page, the latest photo appears. Here's what you'll need:
A PC or Mac with an Internet connection and an account that allows you to create your own Web page (yes, you can use AOL). For frequent updating of images, a high-speed T1, cable or ADSL connection makes life easier, but dialup connections will work just fine.
A PC-compatible video camera. I used a $99 Philips XPCA645VC camera (www.philips.com), which hooked up to my computer's Universal Serial Bus (USB) port and produced excellent results. If you really want to get started on the cheap, you can try the $80 Logitech QuickCam VC (www.logitech.com), which comes with a parallel port or USB connector for PCs. Get the USB model if your PC supports it. The QuickCam also comes in a Mac version that's USB-only. To use it on older Macs, you'll need a converter. These cameras can also be used for video conferencing or capturing photos that you can paste into printed documents, post on the Web or send as e-mail attachments. They're enjoyable accessories no matter what you do with them.
Using an existing home camcorder as a Web cam won't save you money. To use a camcorder, you'll have to install a video capture card in your PC at a cost of $100 to $300 or buy external signal converter such as Logitech's $70 QuickClip. Owners of multimedia-equipped Macs can attach camcorders directly to their computers.
Web cam software that will capture a freeze-frame image from your camera and upload it to your Web site at intervals you choose. These are available as shareware programs that can be downloaded over the Web. For a good selection, surf to ZDnet's download library (www.zdnet.com) or Cnet's shareware site (www.shareware.com) and enter the term "Webcam" in the search prompt.
A Web page editor. Both Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer come with editors as part of the package. In a pinch, you can use Microsoft Word, Notepad or any regular text editor, but these require that you learn HTML, the markup language of the Web.
To build my Web cam, I first unwrapped the the little egg-shaped Philips video camera, which installed without a hitch in about five minutes, thanks to an excellent quick-start instruction sheet. It produced images that were surprisingly crisp for a camera in its price range.
Having snapped a picture of the office, I uploaded it to my Web server, along with a simple Web page that linked to the photo.
Next I downloaded Bill Oatman's $5 SpyCam software (www.netacc.net/water_bry/
SpyCam/SpyCam.htm), a bare-bones Web cam program that took me about half an hour to puzzle through. I don't recommend it for beginners. There's no instruction manual, and help is only available on a button-by-button basis. Eventually, I logged onto the SpyCam Web site where I found solutions to the particular problems I was having. I also found that SpyCam wouldn't update my Web site photo automatically unless it was the active program in Windows, which made it impossible to run in the background.
Then I tried a $20 shareware program called KabCam (www.kabsoftware.com), which was much easier to set up, had decent help and more importantly, uploaded photos in the background with no fuss. I didn't try setting up a Web cam with a Mac, but there's a pretty good buzz circulating around a Web cam program called Oculus (www.intlweb.com/Oculus2/).
The hardest part of using both the programs I tried was figuring out the directory structure of my Web site so that the software could deliver the updated photos to the right address. Web cam software uses the Internet's File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to transmit pictures, and FTP programs need a slightly different type of address than Web pages. If you haven't used FTP before, you might want ask your Internet Service Provider for help.
In any case, it didn't take long to get NewsroomCam running, and soon everybody who passed by was mugging for the lens. The page I set up was also pretty crude -- if you get hooked on this stuff, you'll probably wind up writing fancy Javascripts or buying a spiffy video setup so you can mount a camera on your roof and transmit the images to your PC in the basement.
But getting started was relatively painless and left me with one of those "Gee-whiz" feelings when the gadget actually worked.
By the way, my Web cam is down. While setting up was an interesting exercise, I'm not crazy enough to have people watching me 8 or 10 hours a day. But if you like the idea, enjoy!
Pub Date: 03/22/99