Helping You Setup A Live Webcam

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March 10th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

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.

If you have a friend or a relative living away from you who has internet access, then it would be a good idea to ask them to test your live webcam. Remember that the larger the image, the lower the refresh rate. Ask them to look at your web cam video and tell you how it looks while you set it to different combinations of image size and refresh rates. That way you get to have fun with your camera even before you show images to the public.

If you don’t have any friends to help you with your experiment, then keep the following tips in mind: the bigger the image, the slower the refresh rate will be. The maximum refresh rate for a 320 x 240 pixel image is around 20-30 seconds. For a faster rate, the image size needs to be reduced. A 160 x 120 pixel image can be refreshed every 10 seconds. That is also a good size if you plan on using live streaming video. It allows users who have a slower internet speed to view your live webcam without any glitches.

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