All in Perl - the web cam cam.

What It Does

Let's assume you want to watch a couple of web cams at the same time. And you would like to be able to browse through recent images, maybe even time lapse movie style. Then you're gonna love AC.cam!

How does it work? You define one or more webcam pages. Then you select the webcams you would like to see on each page. The rest is done by AC.cam. AC.cam fetches a new image from each webcam at a configurable interval. The interval (sampling frequency) and the number of images to keep in the cache (holding time) is configurable as well.

The pages showing the web cams can be viewed with a normal web browser. Some neat JavaScript functions allow for selecting a camera, browsing current and cached images, and even play images like a time lapse movie, forward, backward, and at selectable speeds.

It's possible, too, to specify more than one sampling frequency and holding time. What does that mean? In example, you configure AC.cam to get a new image every 10 minutes, and keep these images for one day (frequency no. 1). In addition, you might want to keep hourly images for 36 hours, and daily images for 31 days (frequencies no. 2 and 3). Older images are purged from the cache.

A tool that comes with AC.cam creates MPEG movies from the cached images. In example, you could create a time lapse movie that consists of daily images over the period of one month. If you do this every month, you'll have an archive of movies that covers any length of time you wish.

AC.cam works with Netscape/Mozilla and MS Internet Explorer. Though I prefer Opera, the extensive use of JavaScript precludes the use of this otherwise wonderful browser!