I have a web cam. It’s nice. It takes good quality video.

BUT IT DOESN’T DO WHAT I WANT IT TO DO.

Here’s ALL I want:

1. Have a window on my desktop showing me what it sees.

2. Take date/time-stamped snapshot and upload them to my web site at a configurable interval like ‘every two minutes’.

3. Take video, or multiple date/time-stamped snapshots, and save them on my local machine. I can sort through them or use the separate images to make a ‘movie’ of the day.

Simple. NOT. I have tried literally DOZENS of software packages, both fee/open source and commercial, as well as freeware and shareware. NONE of them do all three. NONE. And if they say they do, they’re either lying or have truly poor documentation on how to do it.

It truly sucks that we have ALL these web cam software vendors and not one of them got it right. To be fair, some of them TRIED to do all three, but one of the three items fell WAY short of be usable.

For instance, YawCam. A free package that will do all three, BUT you can’t see the desktop window’s image due to flicker. It will KILL your eyes to watch it. There was a fix, however. Stopped the flicker, but killed the control panel for your camera. You could watch the desktop video, but couldn’t move your camera or control its zoom. Nice.

So I’m basically at a standstill. I can’t do all three and I have no idea how to fix it. I HATE THAT.

For my weather page, a camera view: CLICK ME

For my desktop, a great picture (With sound if I want it!)

For my day-to-day archive: CLICK ME

[SIGH]