Before getting live, you'll need to decide if you want (and can) handle a streaming cam or not. "What is a Steaming WebCam?" you ask... well, name says it all: a WebCam where you see (live) streaming video, video flowing like it would in a TV... or at least this is what streaming WebCams try... The truth is that the Internet is STILL too young to handle soo much traffic. You'll need a lot of bandwith to send streaming video at a reasonable rate and quality.

So basically here are the INs and OUTs of each system, put feet on earth, stuck with the current present of the technology and decide for yourself:

Streaming WebCams: the nice part of the streaming WebCams is that they stream (or at least try to). Streaming means you see the images of the WebCam in a continuous motion (like in a TV) but the reality is that the image quality tends to be poor and the motion is not as smooth as the TV. This method consumes a lot of resources and it's not as easy to set up as the snapshot WebCams...

Snapshot WebCams: the bad part of these WebCams is that the image is only refreshed every xx seconds, there's no continuous motion like in a TV. The good part is that the quality is superb, the resources are minimal and they're very easy to set up (compared to the Streaming ones).

As usual, everything will depend on what we want to do, for whom and which are our resources.

It is important, at this point, to consider the image size of the shots being taken by the WebCam: the greater the image, the lower the refresh rate. A 640x480 (width x height) image can be great to show an amazing panorama, but imagine a poor user with a very slow Internet connection and a Refresh Rate of 3 seconds! Different pieces of hardware and software allow different capture sizes.

A reasonable user-accessible image size can be 320x240 if you plan to refresh the image each 20-30 seconds. If you want lower refresh rates, try with an image size of 160x120, which will let you refresh rates of up to 10 seconds.

The recommended image file format is JPEG files (.JPG). You can play in your WebCam software with its qualitty ratio and may be you can steal some extra bytes to reduce image's size.

For video streams, try to keep an image size of 160x120 so slow Internet connections can have a chance of seeing something.

Different Internet methods for different results!

The main objective now is to know which are the resources available to you on your connection to the Net. Due to obvious reasons, we can't offer support for each Internet account around the World, but we'll try to explain which are the actual possibilities. So you may want to check first with your ISP which limitations do you have regarding bandwith consumption and if you can afford a 24 hours connection to the Net.

Client pull

This method is the most used by WebCam users to show single snapshots of whatever the WebCam points to. It is the most easy method to set up, and the one that works perfectly for dial-up style Internet connections. It also won't take much bandwith from your connection, so you're still able to surf the Web, get e-mail, IRCing and many more things while your WebCam snaps shots. Thus, you won't be able to serve video feeds with this method.

This method is usually accomplished with an FTP connection that sends the last shot captured by the WebCam to your ISP's hard drive or site hosting your web pages.

Server push

This is the most resource-consuming method, and thus, the least implemented. But it is also the most live method, as it will allow the users to view real-time video streams coming directly from your WebCam. It has its obvious limitations; to mention some:

• It requires a high bandwith connection to be at least a bit live.
• You must put a limit to the video stream for each user connecting to it.
• A dial-up connection is almost useless to apply this method.
• Firewall based networks can have limited the access to this kind of method.
• Only the most recent browser versions support Server push.

So, to set up a properly Server push WebCam, you'll need a fixed IP (dynamic IP's are NOT impossible, but you need more resources, as explained before) and a small Server push software.

LAN files

If you're so lucky you operate in a LAN connected to the Internet and a small web server running in it, you can make your webcam page to point directly to locally saved images captured by your webcam software.

Now that you know the methods, learn "How to make it Live!".