Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is There a Modern IP Webcam That Lets the User Control the Output?
First time accepted submitter Tronster writes Owners of a local shop have a menu that changes daily and wanted an IP webcam to update an image on their web-site. After a frustrating 2 hours of a "Hikvision" refusing to behave, I threw in the towel and looked for a better camera to recommend. The biggest issue today is that the new webcams that come out don't support FTP, they all support sending images/video direct to a "private cloud" (e.g., Simplicam, Dropcam, etc...). Google has been no help; all the sites are either outdated in terms of ranking or the most recent ones recommend a Foscam. They previously tried one of these and it's image quality was too poor. While security systems and home automation has been discussed recently, I haven't found any recent discussions on webcams that give a user control of where the content is sent. Does anyone in the Slashdot community have recommendations, reputable sites that are up-to-date in rankings, and/or hacks to have control over some of these newer cameras?
Second, you could just take a stock webcam, attach it to an RPi, let it make a picture, let's say every 15 minutes and upload it to the desired FTP server. 100% scriptable.
Personally, I think this idea is ripe for abuse. Somebody is going to draw penises on the menu and it will be there on the site for all to see. Overthink your workflow instead of doing this.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
..to snap a photo of the menu with their smart phone and upload it to a website every day? Most restaurants around here do that.
hookers and grits.
Use any webcam or USB connected camera and 'motion' a Linux FOSS tool that lets you program picture taking any which way you want.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
It will just look bad an unprofessional. Write the menu on a computer, if you need photos use a digital camera!
You're looking for a "webcam", stop looking for a "webcam" and you will find what you want.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Finally, a proper use case for the Raspberry Pi. And in its natural habitat at that!
I'd go with a Raspberry Pi (35$), either with a camera module or a no-infrared module; a small shell script will do, google for it!
The Sharx brand cameras are expensive (~$280) but have many great capabilities built in, including dumping to a NAS and motion alerts with emailed snapshots. I've run them in some capacity for over five years with no trouble. My only complaint other than price is that the UI is not always very self-explanatory, and they refuse to post PDF manuals on their site, so don't lose the (extensive) paper manual.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Axis,
Don't buy the cheap shitty ones Q6034 is a nice model that will upload via FTP on a schedule.
There are several tools which allow you to put an RTSP stream on a webpage using VLC and other tools. The Hikvision camera you have will support that.
WB350F
It is a regular pocket camera that can connect to wifi and email photos. It might work for you. Have the people pick the camera up, take a picture of the menu, press the email button, and then have the website poll the email account every 10 minutes for a picture sent by the address associated with the camera.
A little messy but I think that is the way to go. It does require people pick the camera up and do that every day. But is that a problem?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
https://github.com/sgjava/byoc then you can use SCP or something other transport.
Since you don't like the quality of Foscam, how about an old Android phone? I own a Foscam and had no problems with the quality, so I assume you want a higher resolution. Any old or cheap Android phone will likely have a high enough resolution. Combine that with something like autocam and write a small script that ftps the picture (have never tried autocam so I'm not sure if it is OK...). The phone will have wifi etc. all build in. You might needs some creativity to mount it to a wall.
---
Mount it where you need your "webcam". There are free webcam apps for Android (and probably for iOS - none, that are any use anyway, for Windows Phone). As long as you don't need PTZ, these are actually really good. You can port forward through your router and remote control them too - turn flash off and on, etc. And they do support uploading JPEGs. I have an old Galaxy S3 keeping an eye on my back yard.
I use many ip cameras at work and all of them allow you to access their current image as a still at (for example) 192.168.1.175/image
But, it would need to be a real camera, not a dinky webcam or drop cam-like thing. We use cameras from Arecont Vision but any commercial grade security camera from Sony or Axis has a similar feature.
Blue Iris software along with you HK camera supports FTP to anywhere (and a bunch of other stuff).
The Axis M-1004W supports an FTP location as the recipient for an event. An event can be scheduled for a specific time of day. It supports 720p resolution.
If you want anything higher then 1024p, you're probably no longer looking for a webcam.
You would have a Linux box with full control and full HD!
Obviously what they need to do is buy a display to project their menu with. That way they can upload the menu electronically and have the display update from that.
Joking aside it is not uncommon to do so, had I wanted to be absurd or at least more geeky I could had suggested a cnc chalkboard like this guy built: http://vimeo.com/38425565
http://us.dlink.com/products/c... ... supports FTP.
$63 - problem solved.
Beware of the Leopard.
Even my $20 basic D-Link (DCS-930L) IP enabled camera has FTP upload capability. I'm pretty sure the very similar TP-Link one does as well. These are not really as hard to find as the OP suggests. If you spend a few minutes looking at most of the companies that have been doing cameras for more than a couple of years you'll find plenty with FTP upload capability. Just stay away from the overpriced ones with clever names e.g. "Dropcam" and stick to something more basic. If you do want to spend some money and get a much better camera go for a commercial one like an Axis.
All Foscam/Loftek cameras I've played with allow for the image to simply be retrieved as a JPEG from the camera by accessing an HTTP URL with a username/password in the query string. (Sometimes in a streaming/server-push manner, but I assume there's a way to change or work around that)
From your question, I don't quite understand what you're trying to do with FTP, but Foscam/Loftek+wget should give you the flexibility you need. (Before buying, I recommend consulting the Zoneminder wiki/forums, as cameras that aren't flexible with their content don't work with Zoneminder either.)
I've seen restaurants use photos of the menu taken from a phone or even a serious camera, and it looks amateur. Webcam is unlikely to look better no matter what you do.
If this menu is done daily and looks professional in the restaurant, it should be professionally done on the website, such as a PDF. If the menu is just a chalk board that someone updates by hand, possibly several times a day, then a photo should be fine, but even then you should take a proper photograph from close up and upload it.
This would dead simple with a raspberrypi and pi camera module. Cron takes a still shot (raspistill -o filename.jpg) every 5 or 10 minutes. Rsync over ssh to your website via cron every 5 or 10 minutes. Create a nice looking webpage that displays the image. Since the image name never changes your web page is updated as soon as the new jpg is uploaded.
Seriously? Plaintext passwords in 2015? What could possibly go wrong?
It sounds like the owner is writing a menu on a daily basis, and may be updating the menu during the course of business. Webcams has crappy resolutions, digital cameras tends to get "lost", more so when more than 1 person is using it. So, why a camera? My work has one of those digital whiteboards (yes, I know they're more expensive than a webcam), but I imagine it's possible to write once and then pressing a button, a snapshot of what is written on the whiteboard gets uploaded to the proper place?
Mobotix cameras are all I use at work. Excellent image quality with FTP uploading, although a little pricey (~$800).
It's already been said, but again Raspberry Pi for complete control. :)
why won't you edit?
http://www.ubnt.com/products/#all/surveillance
Saying "they tried a Foscam but the quality was too poor" is like saying "they tried food but didn't like it". Which one? Foscam make dozens of models up to at least 960p (I haven't checked their range recently), I find it hard to believe they won't work for this (or at least any worse than the other manufacturers' cameras).
I never really looked at this stuff previously, but got to pick up on a project that had been started already. The installers used cameras from AXIS; I'm reasonably impressed by them so far.
It sounds like you're thinking the camera should "push" and you're asking why the end-user can't control "where to". The unit that I have (M1114) gives you the ability to "pull" - this might be a better fit to your needs. Yes, a bit trickier than something that self-publishes, but much more control.
(The big issue here was this is being used for surveillance, and there were many choices for server software, most of which were Windows-based - I'll put in a plug for 'motion', a package that we're running on Ubuntu and has been pretty flawless for what we needed. People here were impressed by the result of both the software and the hardware.)
Don't give up, there are good industrial-grade IP camera solutions out there!
K. M. Peterson Boston inbox@kmpeterson.com
Get an old Mac, install Evocam on it, and go wild. It works with dozens of cameras and will do whatever you want to do with it.
Check it out:
http://www.evological.com/evocam.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ubiquiti Networks make some decent cameras with a whole bunch of decent features including fetching a snapshot with an HTTP request. They are designed to send their video output to their DVR software (which is actively supported on Linux) but in practice if all you need is to access still images over HTTP and video over RTSP then you can set up the control software on your laptop, fire it up once to configure the camera and then switch it off and the camera will continue to run without the DVR.
Of course, as other posters have pointed out, the right answer is to brew your own with a Raspberry Pi and a Pi Camera.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
On the current D-Link webcams available from BestBuy (e.g. DCS-2132LB1, DCS-5222LB1) besides their "Cloud" you can configure them to upload to FTP, CIFS, Email, and SD. The setting is done through Setup -> Event Setup. Add an FTP server and event to Periodic and Trigger, for instance, once per minute.
StarDot Technologies webcams run Linux. I have root access for my camera, and I have modified the various shell scripts in the camera to send images where I want them to be sent. In my camera FTP is supported.
I like your concept - it's very personal way to deliver the chalkboarded menu to the patrons who can't be there but can't be for whatever reason.
From the camera PoV, I ran into a very similar situation as you. I wanted to grab a shot of the sky every minute, and upload it to Wunderground. I wanted a super-high-resolution image, and a camera that would work well at night. I wanted CCD. I wanted a variety of lenses.I wanted CHEAP. So, on eBay, I found what turned out to be an excellent image quality security IP cam from manufactured by someone called H264DVR. 1920x1280 px. HQ Sony 0.4" CCD. 4, 8 and 12 mm lenses. Had all those useless (at least to me) modes on motion, zones, loss of video, etc. Had tons of tweakation for video parameters (agc, low light, shutter speed, etc). Was in a waterproof outdoor assembly with a big array of IR LEDs for illumination. Was $69 apiece with a lens of your choice, and additional lenses were $7. Took a gamble with 1 and with 8 mm lens.
Arrived. tried it out. Quality of live video astonishingly good for $70. On tripod and aimed at Orion rising, could see easily mag 8 stars in field. Array sensitivity looked very good, and could manually adjust many of the necessary parameters to make a good image. For grabbing a still, spent a few days beating my head against it. Looking on line, found some info on ways typical people and software get images from live IP streams. One was using rstp commands.
Went back to chinese vendor, discovered (with some back and forth) that camera had a completely unmentioned rtsp:// command which was in a format completely different from what the industry uses.
Found software called IP Time Lapse (written by Mike McCormick up in Hew Hampshire) which was rough around the edges but showed some promise in the trial demo of it. Worked with him until we got the camera working well with the software. IPTL uses ffmpeg so I imagine that it could be done by others.
In your case, find the rtsp;// command for grabbing a stream or grabbing a single image. Once you have your single image, you've got what you need!
Good luck.
how about just let the owners take a picture with their smartphone and email it. Have a script to poll the inbox for a new mail, get the jpg and upload it to your webserver and delete the email. Have some logic for a failsafe operation.
You are overcomplicating a simple thing. Welcome to /.
CHDK loaded on a cheap used canon powershot camera, connected to a RPi via USB. CHDK script to take a picture hourly at your desired resolution, ptp it to the rpi, which you write a small cron job to sftp/rsync/ftp to the server with the correct filename. $200, heck, $100 if you shop around (Saw a Canon A530 on ebay for $15!) and some time doing the setup. Non-trivial time, mind you- but it'll do exactly what you want with a fantastic picture quality.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
I would look at the motion app which has a range of timed and scene change options for image capture and output. I use a web camera connected to a Raspberry Pi in conjunction with cron tasks linked to simple scripts and the dropbox applications interface to auto upload camera scenes where scene changes have been detected. Motion has an easy to use configure file and can perform change based or timed image capture. Motion allows the camera choice to determine the upper limit on image quality but other software options that set output format and compression levels, if you select them, could degrade this quality. This solution separates image file generation and capture (Camera/Motion S/W) from image transmission (script file coding) which I believe is the best architecture to work with. Everything of importance is then determined by you and not the packaged app you pick.
Restaurants are notorious for bad website design and not updating their websites with their menus very often.
While I applaud this restaurant's impulse to actually keep their on-line menus up to date (really, I would patronize them solely for that reason if I knew who they were and they were nearby) I stand with everyone else who says, "For God's sake, snap a picture every time you write on the board and put it on-line."
Scan it in. Sounds like you'll get the resolution you're looking for that way.
HikVision are not my favorite camera to use and prefer Axis or a ton of others, but they all do the same job.
What is with needing FTP?
You should have the corporate site web page that pulls up an image from the HikVision IP camera. That camera is password protected and will only pay attention to the web site or your programming IP address. Could do live feed or update on whatever schedule you want.
It sounds like the main chef wants to hand-write the menu and doesn't want to do it any other way, and you are compensating for it.
The Dahau 3200S can be had fro as little as $130, does 1080p and has ftp upload built directly into the camera
Restaurant sites are what usability pros show onscreen when they want to get a belly laugh from the audience.
The reason is that restaurants are focused on looks before usability. This leads them to use pictures of text, PDFs, and the hated Flash.
Those technologies range from poor to complete fail when it comes to searchability, mobile adaptability, accessibility, and ability to select and copy/paste text.
Please, use HTML text instead. It's not hard to format it beautifully with CSS, and you'll be helping patrons find you, paste the address into their contacts or GPS, share favorite stuff with friends, and get a dollar out of their hands and into yours.
That's like saying "data base."
I doubt your technical expertise.
you want a "modern" camera that will "support FTP?" No modern *anything* should. And seriously, what the hell sort of process is this that you'd do this this way? If the menu changed, then someone typed the new one. Instead of saving as a doc, save as a pdf - boom, there's your pdf. You seem to be making a convoluted process just to bill them 10x as much as they could pay, to create a complicated pathway which will be expensive and non-intuitive to maintain. Is this a job security thing?
The nineties called.
They want their coffee-cam back.
I've got a couple TrendNet TV-IP862IC. They support 720p H.264 video, and speak FTP and (crucially for my application) Samba.
Caught me a burglar with 'em: he came in, poked around, noticed the camera and ripped it out of the wall, but not before the camera sent his picture to the SMB fileserver hidden in a closet. Police recognized him, picked him up, and he confessed to a string of burglaries to support his heroin habit.
I would look first at the camera that you want. Let the store take a picture and upload that to the website. I bet the quality will still be too poor, depending on how large the board is they write it on.
A chalkboard or whiteboard is a differnt medium then a website. Much will also depend on the lighting of when the image is taken. The handwriting of the person who wrote it and so on.
I often am unable to read the board when I am in a restaurant.
Again, these are two differnt mediums and I am not sure if it would mix with a website.
If I were to do it, I would buy the best webcam that works under Linux and have a small device take the images by the OS, not by the camera. That way you can SFTP it to wherever you like after doing whatever you want with it. ImageMagick can crop it and do whatever else you would need to the images.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What about something that I've thought about? Using a cheapie Android phone (i.e. pay as you go, can get an LG Fuel - rootable - for $10 on sale from time to time). Obviously only if you're really into digging into coding if you want absolute security, but I'm sure there's something out there perhaps pre-packaged in an app to do what you want. I've thought of this as a sort of hacked-together security system for home just to upload video of anyone coming and going from the house. And yes, I know it's not really security - but honestly, I'll defer to a monitored service if I want the "security" portion.
Karnal
Axis webcams permit loading a single jpeg, using one of several tools, none of which include their super fancy "look at the webcam" web app.
For example, using the *nix command "curl" gives you a jpeg of what's currently being watched, presto, no grief, no complications.
What you -do- with the jpeg is very much up to you.
I run multiple cameras looking out of my residence, and stuff them into motion jpeg files on a terabyte disk. I use a cron file to change files on an hourly basis, and with the number of cameras I have, I have on hand about four weeks of video coverage. I'm using an atom processor, and the whole affair was cheap and very easy to maintain.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Axiscam. http://www.axis.com/
I just tried google and found D-Linkthat has an FTP client and http+https So you could let the website access the camera for updates. Bit of scripting should solve it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That's all you need. If you want a better quality image than a cheap USB webcam, use the Raspberry Pi camera, but a $5 USB cam works just fine if you don't need a high frame rate -- and if you're just pointing the thing at a menu, you only need one frame a day ;). The software is FOSS, and works just fine on the r-pi. I use such a setup to monitor my 3D printer from elsewhere in the house. If you need fine-grained control over who connects, well the Raspberry's running linux, so go nuts.
Although that seems ridiculous overkill for a relatively static menu.
-- Alastair
Yes webcams. Those little devices that are really cheap and give you an absolutely ugly picture, or those that cost several hundred dollars and give you an absolutely ugly picture. My monitors are fairly cheap, and default to 1920x1080 (standard HD). The standard el-cheapo web cam I have provides a stunning-ly grainy 320x200 picture, and there are times when there are more colors than black and white (you should all remember that black is a color and white is a color). There is no auto-focus in this camera, no ability to deal with extremely bright or dim light. It was quite cheap, but you can spend hundreds more and basically get the same quality. Shy of going out and getting a GoPro(tm), I can't really recommend anything.
Right on to the submitter, screw cameras that only work with a subscription, or a smartphone, or whatever.
http://tinyurl.com/dealexcelcam14
This is a pan/tilt camera with no zoom. I've bought 5 of these, and I'm very happy with them. I'm trying to get the neighborhood interested in buying these, so we can have a central website to run a "virtual neighborhood watch" out of, and also have pooled offsite recordings.
They have an embedded web server, and come with basic multi-cam watching/recording s/w for windows. Smartphone app that seems to be cloud-dependent(haven't used that myself). You can retrieve still images and video streams from URLs. Embed the image in your own web page and control all of the functions by clicking buttons/links to shoot command URLs at it. Camera FTP's images upon motion detection. Connect to it with Ethernet or WIFI. With a custom profile, they work with Zoneminder Linux surveillance s/w. Has remote camera and speaker you can use as a baby monitor, or like an intercom. Pretty good night vision, including infra-LEDs. They're meant for indoors, but I've had 3 of them outside for over a year, under the roof eaves, and they're still going strong with the occasional lens cleaning.
Only two complaints: they're really picky about voltages (5v), so Power Over Ethernet isn't stable. Mainly because the motors slurp a lot more power than the camera/networking. Secondly: they all come configured with THE SAME WIRELESS MAC ADDRESS, so you need to use an included configuration utility to fix that, and the Chinglish utility is a biotch to figure out.
# photograph the menu at 9AM
0 9 * * * uvccapture -otodaysmenu.jpg
What other human-elimination task would you like today?
Use any networked computer at the local site to pull the JPG image from the camera, e.g. using WGET.
Then upload to the server. If it works, add a cron job (applies to Linux).
Look into foscam....
I use those for home Security. They support ftpîand various other protocols.
If I were to guess, the menu changes daily and is written on something like a chalkboard or whiteboard. They could print it, but the handwriting gives it a homestyle artistic "flare" that the restaurant wants to maintain.
Marketing 101
The home style look you mention requires the use of real chalk and a real chalkboard. What a restaurant in this class needs is a discreet unattended webcam that can post live changes to the menu to its website.
Fail this and you might as well go back to flipping burgers at McD's.
Any IP camera that provides a URL to return the current still frame as a JPEG can be easily used for this. Write a script to grab the screenshot periodically and stick it in the directory where the web server can find it, or the script can proceed to FTP it to its rightful destination.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
It's pretty common at beer bars to change a chalkboard menu every time a keg runs out and a new one comes on. In a busy place with 20+ taps, this can happen every half hour. I think some camera that uploads a new photo every minute or so is an awesome way to handle this.
All of the professional IP cameras I have make this a dead simple task. Choose a decent camera from a vendor such as Axis, Pelco, Sony, Toshiba etc with external GPIO. Almost all of those cameras include 1 input and 1 output (relay). You can easily connect a push button switch ie. doorbell button and define a macro when the button is pressed FTP the image over to a specific webserver. The external inputs and outputs can be setup to do anything you want using macros saved in the camera, if there is motion turn on a light etc, or trigger an alarm system. If you stick with Axis products they have an open Linux system so can be customized further if you have those skills.
Available at Amazon, eBay, etc. starting around $70. These IP cameras will email or ftp still images at 640x480 or you can "pull ftp" motion sensed videos at 720p. Dericam cameras are Linux based and "hackable" because the administrator password let you overwrite flash memory. They are also easy to unbrick *if* you mess up.
This example is a indoor Pan-Tilt camera: http://www.amazon.com/Dericam-...
They do have some bugs, like all these Asian made IP Cameras seem to regardless of price, but unlike almost all the others you can work or hack around them.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
I came here to learn about Modern IP Webcams.
There is no need for a debate about how to run a restaurant.
Axis cameras FTP out of the Box
Instead of having a camera taking a picture of a chalkboard every X minutes all the time and uploading the pictures to a website how about replacing the chalkboard with a monitor that shows the menu from the website. Then change the menu on the website to look like a chalkboard. When the chef or manager wants to update the menu they use the computer in the office to change the file and upload the changes to the website. The display in the restaurant would get updated (it could poll the web server every minute or ten) automatically. Plus the menu becomes more accessible to those with disabilities.
Is anyone going to answer the fucking question instead of shitpicking over the phrasing and implementation?
Sharx Security cameras have excellent video quality and allow you to send images via FTP to any location that you choose. www.sharxsecurity.com
You have several options:
1. Get this board, attach your WebCam to it and write couple of bash lines
http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/4169167/black-swift---coin-sized-board-powered-by-32-bit-mips-cpu-at-400mhz-running-open for managing your FTP uploads.
2. Install iSpy from http://www.ispyconnect.com/ it has FTP support
3. I prefer D-Link cameras, just look at this list of models here http://www.ispyconnect.com/man.aspx?n=D+Link you need one which able to deliver just a JPEG frame on request.
I came here to learn about Modern IP Webcams.
There is no need for a debate about how to run a restaurant.
Unless, perhaps, you need a Modern IP Webcam to collect evidence of food mishandling in the kitchen or (in the case of fast food) violence at the counter.
I have used YAWCAM many times. It has many options to output still and videos.
Get a used android phone. Download Tasker or AutoRemote. If you use Tasker, you can have the photo taken and sent where you want based on some event. If you have an android phone yourself, you can remote control the slave phone to take the phone when you desire. PHONES with cameras and wifi are cheap to do what you are wanting. Just leave the slave phone mounted where you need it to be to take the picture.
I am with the guy that said to use HTTP and forego the picture taking. There is much more value to your operation in the end if you leverage it properly.
It's your karma,
Bob
Y-Cams can FTP (and a lot more), and have a robust documented interface. They are a UK company and don't have great US distribution, but there are several distributors and their products are well built and well supported. They are a bit more expensive, but you get what you pay for.
You really aren't doing yourself any favors by being sassy to people offering answers/clarification to your poorly phrased question.
You need a picture of your HANDWRITTEN chalkboard menu to update daily, yes? Okay.
But your camera will only upload to dropbox. Okay.
It took me 30 seconds on the google to see examples of command-line curl to dropbox. So you'll have a cron script on your webserver to retrieve that image daily. Or a button on the admin page of your server to grab the day's image.
Oh, but the image is named 'randddommnNNNaaa.jpg' on dropbox, but I need it to be 'todays menu.gif' on our website. That's pretty trivially scriptable too.
If the last 2 paragraphs don't make sense to you, you need to hire someone to do this task.
What you don't need is a special camera that specially posts stuff direct to your wen server.
They have a website. Is it purely static or is there any method of scripting like Bash, PHP etc? Can DDNS overcome the dynamic IP problem? Can you open connectivity in to the camera from the webserver?
Axis IP cameras support FTP , they are expensive though As for hikvision you should be able to grab an image via http They have an SDK available If you can't find it let me know and I will check , I also thought they supported FTP But that may only be on alarm
For this sort of thing I'd go to ebay and search on "video server." These things usually support NTSC and PAL cameras and provide them IP/web connection and motion capture with FTP and Email. The advantage of these is you're not stuck with the el-cheapo built-in cameras most IP cams have. You can get a hi-rez (>=600 line) starlight cam using a Sony Effio chip or similar for probably less than $100 (also on ebay) and get good nighttime vision and great daytime color with decent resolution as well. It's not HD, but it gives you options you won't have with an integrated IP cam unit AND it's relatively cheap. Generally you can use wget to grab stills from these, as there's usually a still grab URL. And many have motion detection FTP features as well, that can auto-upload an image to a website based on the alarm trigger, which by the way you could do with a button as most have external alarm NO/NC switch terminal inputs that will trigger the capture.
You have to pay about $450 for the camera. AXIS work great for this.
tell your customer to stop being a cheap bastard and spend the money on the real deal.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What the F#$%. I'm using IP cameras for almost 10 years and ALL of them have AT LEAST the ability to send images to FTP server. Mobotix and Axis are briliant, but really a total overkill for the purpose. Vivotek, Y-cam, Acti, D-link, Linksys, Trendnet, LevelOne, just name it. Of course I can't give any oppinion on cheep chinese crap.
Googling "ftp camera" turned up many candidates. The second one (after CameraFTP, which isn't what you want) had the context string "All Y-cam cameras have the ability to send timed or alert trigged images through an FTP server".
Amazon lists about 1500 hits for Y-Cam. The first couple of pages show cameras up to 1080p and in the $100-$300 range, many with wall and ceiling mounts. This one [ http://www.amazon.com/Y-cam-Surveillance-Weatherproof-compatible-detection/dp/B00I4PJKGI ] should be overkill.
I recall there being an open-source project to replace the firmware in webcams. What happened to it?
You want a 2d grid of pixels on a website to change over time. That means you're making a video, not snapping pictures. It's just a video with a low frame rate. Like 1 frame/week. But it's STILL a video.
So feed your webcam, ANY cam, to VLC or some other streaming package; set your encoder to mpeg 2, P-frame only (I.e. a series of standard jpgs); and point your website at it. Done.
TrendNet has a good reputation across the board, availability is broad at brick and mortar and thru Amazon and other places. 3 yr warranty and comes in 1280x720 with very low light support. FTP is a supported protocol. Some tweaking may be needed, but at least you can. CMOS sensor means it will handle low light well.
pull the plug
Subject says it all find any network cams that support RTSP access :)
and / or a LOT of the supercheap boards like the IP9000 support .jpg access for stills
have fun
anon
ps wireshark is your friend when discovering how vendor supplied software calls for and authenticates to the RTSP Stream..
I don't know your exact budget as it's not detailed but Axis has made quality webcams for >15 years (I've got a 2100 from ~2000 and it's still running fine) and they support ftp uploading. The small M10s are dirt cheap, but work well. Check out http://www.axis.com/products/m... to see. If you want something fancier look at their higher priced offerings with better features. I don't work there, own stock, resell them, etc, but I've had great luck with their cameras for a really long time.
Grab an axis camera or encoder. You can grab screen shots via wget ( http get), or an api.
Turned on ftp on an empire and grandstream ip cameras and both upload via ftp.
Google ip or ip security cam vs web cam.
Use a cell phone camera and take a photo and post that if you think the digital menu is the way to go.
That said, Foscam allows good old fashioned ftp uploads if you really want a webcam.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I've used this camera in the past. It has a ton of options, even an FTP option when motion is detected. This could be easily made to upload a static image that should start updating when someone begins to change the menu and stop when they are done.
Video cameras all have very low resolution compared to a still camera, so don't try to use a video camera to get a good quality still photo. Almost all still cameras today support Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP). If there's already a computer on the site, it's as simple as plugging it in and loading some free software. If not, you can add one or something like a Raspberry Pi if you're comfortable with that sort of thing. There are also things like the Eye-Fi cards that use WiFi to transfer files automatically. There's probably a dozen other ways to solve it too, I think you've just locked yourself into the idea of using a video camera for no good reason, and that's why you haven't been able to find an acceptable solution.
I am a systems integrator and I can say there are plenty of cameras that upload to ftp and let you chose the file extension. You should be googling for "IP Camera ftp" instead of "IP webcam". You will need to provide the camera with power and a connection to the internet. Programming is done via web browser.
The biggest issue today is that the new webcams that come out don't support FTP, they all support sending images/video direct to a "private cloud" (e.g., Simplicam, Dropcam, etc...).
This is becoming a problem in lots of commercial software. iPhoto can submit pictures to Facebook in one click, but can I give it an SFTP address? It doesn't support WebDAV, but it supports DropBox!? Applications that come with digital cameras are like this. So are email programs. What the heck happened?
A Y-Cam Bullet HD 1080 takes decent quality pictures and supports FTP, but it's quite expensive as it's marketed as a security camera. It also makes a good webcam for outdoor use, such as looking into an enclosure at a wolf centre...
http://macdownload.informer.com/isentry/
Use an old phone as your webcam.
Sharx cameras, as far as I know, use custom software. They are not web-based. This limits the machines and applications they can talk to (pretty severely, in fact.)
I've been in the market for an outdoor 1080p camera that would go to the web (or start there) basically since the tech hinted it was possible; so far, it's all proprietary stuff. I've got an NTSC one that does it, and it's awesome, except, as I said, it's NTSC so basically it's blur city.
Hopefully someone, someday, will realize there are a bunch of us out here who would buy weatherproof hires IP cameras with built-in web servers in a heartbeat. For less than thousands of dollars. It's hard to swallow that kind of price when you know you're looking at under $100 worth of hardware. That's if it's a pretty nice one.
Heck, I can buy a dedicated DVR with *multiple* 1080p cameras, cables, and power supplies for less than a some of the "good" ones being discussed here. With a WEB interface. From a store that is known for overpricing everything is sight!
All I want is one bloody outdoor camera to watch the neighborhood cats in our cat house. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Fswebcam @ OpenWRT, + UVC USB webcam + simple shell script and you are on track. Cheaper and with more control.
What about some software such as yawcam? I'm no expert, but it does show a screenshot that offers a number of upload formats, including ftp. An old pc, a basic usb camera, and software like this might do what you want.
Has anyone seen my eucalyptus tree?
Hi there,
Dlink makes security cameras that can upload to ftp or an email address.
Cameras from Ubiquiti, Vivotek, Axis, and many others support retrieving the current image jpg through a http request to the camera..
Cheap IP cam takes picture, stores to local HDD. Directory on local is sym-/hard-linked to directory (wherever it lives, via whatever standard methods are available depending on your configuration) to either the appropriate image path for the website, overwriting the previously existing image, OR, to a directory where the existence of a new/updated file will prompt an FTP transfer to the serverhost where the website lives.
Many cameras, cheap or expensive, still fully support the saving of still images to a directory on a computer on the local network, regardless of whether the camera is hard-wired or wireless. Other tools and functionality will be present depending on OS for automating any further copies or FTP transfers that may be necessary.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
It will have a much better camera than a high end commercial Webcam and, if there is no existing $0.99 app, you can easily write one to take photos/videos and upload them to a location of your choice. Bonus: can work without another Internet connection, or even provide a WiFi Hotspot to employees/customers while still functioning as a wwbcam.
Have it made up pretty on the webpage. Have the contents of the webpage displayed on some sort of display in the restaurant.
I've seen this done before. You could easily edit the page with some of the WYSIWYG editors.
Actually, your hikvision will likely have very good quality. The 3MP ones have 2048x1536 resolution. However, don't use the hikvision to push the image to some place, instead use a simple script to pull a snapshot image from the Hikvision. Hikvision supports single snapshot image request and you could do with simply with a wget call I expect. A few lines of shell script and it's integrated into your menu system.
Formerly vitamin D software.https://www.sighthound.com/
i use iSpy to control multiple webcams and their output. ftp, youtube, all sorts of outputs available, all running in parallel (output to multiple!)
http://www.ispyconnect.com/
i can't describe how well this has worked for me. hope it suits you!
Just put a bunch of menus in the computer, have it randomly choose one each day to serve up on the internet, and make whatever it chooses.
I've been wildly successful using the small app YAWCam, see http://www.yawcam.com/ It is free to use and about the best and easiest software for webifying plain old USB web cams around. The downside is that you need some sort of Windows PC to go along with it. If that is not an option give the various Foscam wireless webcams a try, I have an older one that films away 24x7 monitoring my backyard. They have settings for specifying image upload to an FTP server without any of the cloud crap. These cameras are inexpensive, so heavy duty pan/tilt action might wear them out sooner than expected. In your (as well as in my) case the position will be static most of the time. These cameras also come with IR night vision if needed, but that can be disabled, which is what you want to do if you mount the camera inside looking out through a window. The IR light reflects in the window and makes the images useless. I have it set so that every three seconds and image is uploaded. On my FTP server I also run a script that dumps image files that are older than two days just to keep the amount of files manageable. In your case you should be fine with a much longer period. You may still need a script that fires as often to find the most recent file and rename it so that the web site can retain a static link. I don't remember if there is a means to set the file name in the camera config so that it constantly overwrites the old image. That said, the PDF route is way easier albeit less geeky, but definitely more reliable. The web cam idea is neat, but it is like using a cannon to shoot at sparrows.
ICRealtime is probably going to be your best bet. they make DVR's and NVR's that allow FTP downloading.
kindof pricey, but i install them all the time and it is quality products.
I haven't seen them mentioned here: Any Point+Shoot or DSLR camera + a (suitable) EyeFi SD-Card, or a Canon EOS with WFT or a 70D or sx280, or maybe a Sony NEX with WiFi should be able to automatically upload images taken via WiFi+FTP or HTTP.