Anyone familiar in the use of webcams?

[IanB]

Hi all
I would like to take my website a liitle further....it's about texturing/artexing. Although i explain quite abit about how to do it etc i would like for my visitors to actually see how it is done..especially the patterns.
What i was thinking of was perhaps a live link up using a webcam. Now i have no knowledge at all of webcams so i dont know if this is possible.
Has anyone done something similar who perhaps could point me in the right direction. Would the quality for viewers be good or are there any pitfalls. Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Many thanks
Ian

[geekgirl]

I only have experience of using a webcam to talk to my freind who moved out of the country. Even with our equipment that is relatively new the picture cannot be turned up to more that medium quality as the audio goes a bit jiggy.

Not sure if it would be good enough quality for your use.

Cheers

[FlyinCJ]

The TV news station that I work at has a website that shows a "live studio cam", but really it's just a fast File Transfer Protocol, with some HTML on that reloads the page automatically for the viewer. I've never truely seen a "live camera" on a web page.

[Jeanie]

If you have windows movie maker on your system or can get it somewhere else for free, all you would have to do is - first use your webcam as video recording and go through all the steps you want to show people in your video, then save that.

Next record your voice explaining all the steps and save it.

Third...make a mp3 movie by using all the saved files.
You can have your voice playing the same time as the movie clip is playing. Just make sure when you do the webcam recording to be very quiet.

:D
Good luck!

[webado]

You will not be able to do live streaming using an ordinary (even a good quality) webcam and a regular server and regular internet connection from your home or office to the ISP, even if high-speed. You'll need ultra-high-speed connection to a streaming server and a lots of rather expensive and sophisticated equipment. Webcams can only transmit a frame every few seconds and you need at least 10 frames per second to have something vaguely reminiscent of motion. 29 or 30fps is what makes actual video. 15 fps is the bare minimum for lo quality video.

Using the webcam to record a video is also an ambitious undertaking. You are better to get an actual video camera, digital preferably, record a video (complete with the audio track), transfer it to your computer through firewire or whatever interface it has and produce a proper video out of it. Video capture is a hog on disk space and processing so unless your computer has both lots of memory, processor speed and a large hard disk you'll be unable to do this. To give you an idea, uncompressed avi which is what usually you can capture to, takes up 1GB per minute of video. Processing it allows you to compress it to reasonable levels. A fairly good quality mpeg file would take about 4MB for one minute of footage. You can produce Windows Media Video (wmv) at about 300kbps which takes about 2.5MB per minute and is good hi-fi web quality. Terrible for dial-up unfortunately. For that you have to go down to at least 96 kbps which is still too much for dial-up, but you can get less than 1MB per minute of footage - smaller image size and lower frame rate though as well.