Look around and you will find web cameras everywhere nowadays. The college or university you attend has one (or many), your office has one for teleconferencing and your friends have one. To go along with the crowd, you have decided to get a video web cam for yourself. Now what?
You get your webcam home and connected to your computer workstation. How do you make that tiny gadget become a live webcam online?
video web cam
The biggest decision you need to make before making your camera live is if you will show still images or streaming video. Visit a webcam directory like www.onlinecamera.com and take a look at a few webcams. You may notice that some of them show a video feed that is a continuous stream of live video, while others simply refresh the page of the browser and show a succession of still pictures at intervals.
Streaming video is, without a doubt, more appealing to a viewer. The question is though; can you support video webcams such as that? If you can afford setting aside a tremendous amount of bandwidth for your usb web cameras to stream and you also have a broadband internet connection, then your answer is yes.
If your answer is no, then you need to stick with a still image camera. They make the process easier for both you and your camera’s viewers. This type of connection can work without any problems, whether you access the internet through a dial-up connection or a high speed broadband connection.
digital web cameras
A still image camera allows you to display images with a much higher picture quality that are larger and not grainy. The big difference is that a video web cam shows a moving and fluid stream of images, whereas still images do not flow the same way.
The next thing to consider is the image size of the pictures taken by your webcam. Just remember that the greater the image, the lower the rate at which it refreshes. An image with a pixel size of 640 x 480 can look great to you, but it can be a great hassle for users with a slow internet connection; especially so if the refresh rate of your camera is set to fairly rapid intervals. Enlist a friend who has internet access to test your live webcam.
home web cams
Keep the following tips in mind just in case you don’t have people to experiment with. Remember the greater the image, the slower the refresh rate. A reasonable refresh rate for a 320 x 240 pixel image is every 20-30 seconds.
Try using an image size of 160 x 120 pixels if you want the picture to update more often, say up to 10 seconds. Try to keep an image size of 160 x 120 if you stream live video, so that slow internet connections can view your live webcam without problems.
