I’ve got a mountain in my backyard. I’ve got an analog camera on my antenna tower pointed at the mountain that actually has a real lens so the picture isn’t flattened out. Way back when, I had it setup as a webcam that steamed real time. Stopped doing that a long time ago. I don’t want to expend the CPU and Internet resources to do that again. What I’d like to do is take a snapshot and send it up to my wunderground station every 30 minutes or so via a FTP server. Seems like that was easy to do at one point in time but I can’t find any software to do that now.
I have SecuritySpy, it seems to only talk to IP cameras now, which is pretty much what it’s doing for me. My tower cam gets converted into a USB port via Ion’s Video 2 PC MKII. So the software needs to be able to deal with a USB camera. EvoCam just spits out .mov files, Macam likewise, EyeCam only works with Isight cameras. I found a Macam add on that sounded like it was just what I was looking for, grabbed frames at predetermined intervals and uploaded to FTP server . . . PERFECT, I think it was BT . . . but it’s a PowerPC program. I’ve looked at bunches of programs, the only ones that remotely look like they might do what I want don’t work with USB cameras.
Does anyone know of a software program that will do what I’m looking to do with a USB camera?
Thanks,
Oh, that’s a problem 
I was going to suggest you get an analog to IP video converter, but seeing the cost it would probably be better to just get an IP camera :roll:
I too have an imac and all that. I decided to save cpu time and effort and went with a cloud service webcam.io. not expensive and what you do is send the image to their cloud, and then they have a script you put into your website and get your image. I have it on mine and so far it is fine. I can have both, video and snapshot
http://www.desmoinesweather.org/weather28/index.php?p=wsWebcamPage&lang=en#data-area
http://www.desmoinesweather.org/weather28/index.php?p=Webcamvideo&lang=en#data-area
http://192.168.0.40:8103/cgi-bin/CGIProxy.fcgi?cmd=snapPicture2&usr=South&pwd=Aardvark
you sub your IP usr and pw and put this in the space for the url of the camera and wd snags it.
Yeah, I’m trying to not go overboard with buying new equipment. I’ve got many IP cameras but they’re fixed lenses that rely on digital zoom and make the mountain (4 Peaks) look like a bump in the background. The “Tower Cam” is a Sony 3 chip camera with 24 to 1 optical zoom lens, old 4:3 480i that’s been going and going and going. I can’t believe it’s still up and running. It’s in a camera enclosure that at one point in time had pan, tilt and zoom control. None of that works anymore, I have to climb the tower anytime I want to reposition the camera. All very old school.
If I’m not careful I’ll run out and get a 4K with optical zoom lens just to hold me over till the 8Ks get reasonable. (I’m a videographer, they were showing 12K at NAB this year) at which point in time my wife would disown me . . .
I was thinking I could just throw up a picture every half hour or so with what I already had available to me, which there was a time that was easy to do. Then again there was a time that buggy whips were useful.
aardvark, your cam looks spectacular . . . I have to resist, I have to resist, I have to resist * * *
Evocam is one software you could check out for Mac?
Evocam is dead. It may be available from download sites but the developer site www.evological.com is gone.
oh…that used to be one of the better ones I always thought
I have Evocam, it only makes video files it doesn’t spit out jpgs from the video feed. But it does a great job of making .mov files.