Video webcam

I received a wireless webcam for my birthday and this is how I integrated the stream into my webpage. You can see the result here , it is the “Front door webcam”.

First you need a TV card with an RCA Video input, this is a yellow coaxial connector. Connect the yellow male RCA connector from your webcam to the video input of the TV card and then using a tv viewer such as tvtime or Xawtv change the input source to S-Video. You should now see a video stream from the camera. If you are using an nVidia card use the command xawtv -noxv to start Xawtv otherwise you will only see a blue screen.

Using synaptic (or whatever) install “Motion”, which is a pretty powerful motion detecting software which has lots of great features that you can experiment with. For this exercise I will only really be using the built in web-server. Here is a link to the Motion Wiki.

You will now need to place a motion.conf file in your home folder, below is a copy of my basic configuration file. Motion delivers a Motion jpeg or MJPEG which doesn’t work in Internet Explorer although it works fine in the Mozilla browsers. Andy Wilcock has written a nice Java applet called Cambozola that enables MJPEG streams to be viewed in IE. Here is a link to Cambozola.

# Minimal motion example config file for webserver provided by Steve Young
daemon off
quiet on
# You may very well need to change this (check with 'dmesg'
# after plugging in your webcam).
videodevice /dev/video0
# Image size in pixels (valid range is camera dependent).
width 640
height 480
framerate 2
quality 100
#auto_brightness off
# General threshold level and noise threshold
# level (for distinguishing between noise and motion).
#threshold 30000
#noise_level 64
# Initial brightness, contrast, hue (NTSC), and saturation.
# 0 = disabled (valid range 0-255).
brightness 180
contrast 150
saturation 100
hue 0
# Encode movies in real-time (install ffmpeg before enabling).
#ffmpeg_cap_new off
# Codec to be used by ffmpeg for the video compression.
# Supported formats: mpeg4, msmpeg4.
#ffmpeg_video_codec msmpeg4
# Target base directory for pictures and films (you may need
# to change this (or change its permissions) depending on
# which system user runs motion).
#target_dir /home/steve/webcamTest
# Define a port number (e.g. 8000) to enable the mini-http server.
# 0 = disabled.
webcam_port 8081
# Set to 'off' to allow anybody (not just localhost) to view the
# webcam via the mini-http server (http://hostname:port).
webcam_localhost off
webcam_quality 100
webcam_maxrate 1
#Steves Options
text_double on
minimum_gap 100
control_port 8082
snapshot_interval 20000
snapshot_filename snap
output_normal off
#jpeg_filename motionjpg
rotate 90
Text_left "My Street"

Ubuntu. Adobe Flash Player not working in Firefox

I did an upgrade of the Adobe Flash Player via the update manager and Flash wouldn’t work in Firefox. I got the message that the plugin was missing but when I tried to download it the message was that the plugin was already installed. A quick google found these solutions. I used the second one which worked.

Google maps applications

Please leave any comments, suggestions for improvement or suggestions for other applications you would like to see on my webpage.

My Google Maps webpage can be found here