I'm looking to setup a webcam so I can keep an eye on breeding projects. Can anyone give me some advice on this. It wouldn't have to be realtime.

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Mike
"Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa

I'm not good with electronics, but I wanted to wish you good luck!!

But what do you want to do? Internet broadcast or just an indoors camera connected to a computer to monitor without disturbing them?

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Wish list: Blue Tongue Skinks and Uruplatus =)

Yes. Broadcast over the net so I can check up on things at work.

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Mike
"Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa

Last time I checked there were a few cheap cameras on the market that came already with the necessary (pc) software to setup and run a simple webcam service on a xDSL or cable line.

I tested one (I think it was a Genius) and even though the image quality was lousy, it was worth the $40 or $50 price tag.
The software was very simple to to set up and in 10 minutes I was set. Beware that broadcasting a live feed takes a lot of bandwidth. Most of these cameras just take a picture every x seconds and upload it to the server. Not only you can monitor in almost "real time" what's going on but you can also review whatever timeframe you want.

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Wish list: Blue Tongue Skinks and Uruplatus =)

That's one of my issues is how much bandwidth it's going to use. I think if I have a pic every 5 minutes that's fine. I don't (can't afford) to upgrade my bandwidth any further.

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Mike
"Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa

5 minutes? you'll miss a lot of stuff!
One photo each 15s equals a total of 5760 phots each 24h. If each photo is 30KB, you'll spend 168MB a day, that's roughly 5GB a month.

Alternatively you can do this another way, you can get one of those dynamic IPs, set up a password protected server on your computer and you'll only spend bandwidth when you log on to see what's happening.
This way you can also review the day when you get home.

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Wish list: Blue Tongue Skinks and Uruplatus =)

I think the dynamic IP might be better. I don't need to see everything all day. Right now my limit is 5 gb I believe.

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Mike
"Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa

I've been reading up on it. It seems I can probably hook up my dig vid camera on video capture instead of getting another webcam. Come to think of it though it's not really near my computer so the dvc cords wouldn't be nearly long enough. I guess maybe I'll try a pnp webcam. If I set it up on a client pull static IP, it shouldn't take too much bandwidth. I hope no one thinks I really know what I'm talking about here. I'm just learning as I go.

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Mike
"Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa

Can you suggest a bare bones software? Something that will just get the images uploaded. Don't really need all the bells and whistles.

__________________
Mike
"Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa