- How to Set Up a Web Cam
- Set Up Your Web Cam
- Build a Web Site for Your Cam
STEP 3: SET UP YOUR WEB CAM
Once you've hooked up your camera to your computer and installed the software, you can start configuring your Web cam. With ISpy, SiteCam, and most other Web cam programs, you can get up and running in the following steps:
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Preview your pictures Any Web cam program will give you a preview of your picture, so you can position your cam and adjust your image settings (see Figure 2).
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Choose your image settings The trick here is to get the best-looking image at the smallest possible file size (so your footage doesn't take too long to load in visitors' Web browsers). I recommend setting your Web cam for 320 x 240 (half-screen), 16-bit JPEG images.
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Select brightness, contrast, and color settings (optional) Most cams automatically adjust to compensate for overly bright or scarce light. However, you can manually tune your brightness, contrast, and color settings if you need to.
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Make a folder for your Web cam images Create a folder on your computer within the folder in which you keep your Web site, then tell your Web cam software where the folder is so it knows where to put the pictures it records.
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Tell your software how often to update your pictures And now for the big question: How often do you want your Web cam to snap pictures and upload them to your Web server? (See Figure 3) If you have a dedicated connection that's hooked up to the Internet all the time, you can update your photos every two seconds if you want. If you're like most people and have a regular dial-up account (especially if you only have one phone line!), you may want to upload your pictures less frequently.
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Tell your Web cam program where to upload the pictures Now, you need to give your software program your Web server information, including the location of your Web site, your username, and your password, so it can upload your pictures.
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Test your Web cam It's time to make sure your Web cam program works properly. ISpy and SiteCam both let you instantly take a picture by selecting a menu command.
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Put a time and date stamp on your pictures (optional) You can also tell ISpy and SiteCam to put the date and time on your pictures (in whatever font and color you want), so your site's visitors know when the images were taken.
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Create a picture history (optional) Web cam programs can generate a series of the last five, ten, twenty (or however many you want) pictures that you've taken. You can then create a Web page with links to each image so visitors can view previous snaps.
Your Web cam program automatically names your pictures. For example, if you create a picture history of five images, your Web cam program will name them something like 01.jpg, 02.jpg, 03.jpg, 04.jpg, and 05.jpg. Although the images change every time your Web cam takes a new picture, the filenames always stay the same.
Note: Chapter 9 of The Little Web Cam Book takes you through all the specific steps for setting up ISpy (Windows) and SiteCam (Macintosh).