Frozen webcam

Hello Everyone,

:?: does anyone know of a software that would restart WD automatically when the webcam picture freezes. Following this forum, it seems to freeze quite frequently. For me it happens every one or two days. When I restart WD the webcam picture is unfrozen.

Thanks everyone.

To Brian,

just a thought.

Would it be difficult to analyse just a part of the webcam picture (like in surveillance mouvement detection software), determine if there is a change with the previous one (dependending on setting: for me it’s every 5 min). If there is a change, that means the webcam is not frozen.(Clouds are always moving. And even at night or by blue sky, the pixels are different from picture to picture; probably due to noise in the signal). In fact at night it’s not important if the picture is frozen, it’s dark anyway.
If there is no change, just shut down WD automatically and let the watchdog do the restart of WD (without restarting the watchdog itself and without restarting the FTP for weather display live ortherwise the FTP sessions will increase by one at each auto restart).

Or there is a more easy way to know if the webcam has frozen.(The date on the picture is changing but the picture contents don’t change when frozen).

Just for info: it has always been like that (probably it’s my setup). WD most of the time shuts down with errors. But this is not a big deal. The most important it never lost weather data.

Thanks a lot as usual.
Cheers from Belgium. 8)

Hello again.

In fact, to make things easier. When webcam picture freezes, the picture is exactly the same except the day and time and others data’s displayed if that option is checked.
So, if the file is always exactly the same, that means webcam picture is frozen and WD can solve this by restarting automatically. This restart works on my system. Thanks.

Cheers.

hi
i guess this is possible
but first try ticking the reset daily at 4am/4pm in the direct web cam setup
(i.e i presume you are using the direct web cam setup in wd (where wd is actualy grabbing the images direct from the web cam?)

Thanks for the reply. I’ll try your suggestion. But I noticed that it usually happen at around 10pm and 0600am, which are the times ticked in “About Weather Display” menu to free memory. I’ll try also to untick that option. Thanks for the clues. How is your leg?

hi
that will be it (hopefully)
that free memory routine should only be used for win98

i can walk Ok now, luckily
thanks

Hello all,
I unchecked Do this auto daily at 10 pm and at 6 m. But the problem is still there. If I push the button free memory now, the webcam freezes also. So, it looks like my win2000 doesn’t like an application to free memory. But I don’t understand why when unchecked, it stil freezes at 10 pm.
Thanks all. 8O

For Brian Info,
today the webcam froze again at 10am sharp. I’ll try RamBooster as adviced on this forum or Ram Idle software to manage memory .
I 'll let you know. :frowning:

hi
the free memory under about weather display is only for use with win95/98 (causes problems with windows 2000 or xp, so do not use for those OS)

yes, the rembooster is a good one to try

i cant find anything of significance on the code for 10am sharp…humm

Hi

Did the frozen webcam image get a cure, be it software revision or other?

My picture freezes and only the time and date updates as in your previous thread.

This also happens with other webcam capture software installed on the same pc linked to a different webcam. Using “webcamcontrol” the image appears to be stacking one ontop of the other while again changing time and date ik.

I am running XP Pro on an Intel P2.2.

Cant keep re booting the pc to clear the problem as the graphs flatline around 12 to 14 hours after!

Thanks for your help.

Edd
www.eastyorkshire.co.uk/eddsfield

Good news.
It’s now one week PC and WD running without any reset and the webcam didn’t freeze.
I installed RamIdle (which was working better than RamBooster on my system).
I think it was freezing because the computer central unit was busy 100% when FTP was going on and as WD is memory hungry, it froze the webcam.
I have only 256 MBytes Ram.
Thanks for all your help.
:smiley: