Helping You Install A Live Webcam
Web cameras can be found almost everywhere in this day and age. Your friends have one, your office has one for teleconferencing and the college or university you attend has several as well. You have made the decision to go along with the crowd and get a network camera for yourself; now what? How do you make that tiny gadget become a live webcam online? Take it home and connect it to your computer, then read on.
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 a network camera such as that? If you can afford setting aside a tremendous amount of bandwidth for your video web cam 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. 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.
Next, you should consider the size of the pictures taken by video webcams. The bigger the image is, the slower the refresh rate. The image might look good to you, but it can be difficult for users with slow internet connections to view it. Ask a friend with an internet connection to test your live webcam before you make it public.
In case you don’t have friends or family to help you experiment, keep the following tips in mind. The larger the image is, the slower the refresh rate will be. An image with a pixel size of 320 x 240 can be refreshed about every 20-30 seconds without any glitches. If you would prefer your images to refresh at a faster rate, then try an image size of 160 x 120 pixels. That smaller size allows for a 10 second refresh rate. If you are going to stream live video, it is recommended that you keep your image size at 160 x 120 pixels so that users with slow internet connections can view your live webcam without any problems.
