VideoPeep: Veiled Sight. Having you small web-camera, you probably have thought
of organizing a hand-made video surveillance system. Its
tasks may be different: For example, you could want to
control your children?s or pets? behavior, or guard for
the "unwanted visitors" when nobody is at home. Whichever
the case is, you will need the appropriate hardware and
software. The hardware role can be successfully completed
by a web-camera (all you need is to hide its "unmasking"
lightning), and for the software I would propose you to
use VideoPeep, a small utility.
The software is as simple as it possibly can be, but that
does not deprive all the features you will need for the
delicate business of video surveillance. It can write the
camera?s signal continuously, but such tactics would
quickly lead to the disk overflow. A more interesting mode
is "write on timer"; but the most suitable one is "write
on motion detection". In this mode, the video signal will
be recorded only when the picture in the camera changes,
and the number of the required changes can be set in the
options. You can also control the picture compression rate (JPEG
algorithms are used), recording frequency and files size
(for example, you can set the file size to 60 min of
video, so a 5-hour-long record would be stored in 5
files). Some additional cool features provided by
VideoPeep include the disk space control (the program will
never leave less than 100 MB of free disk space) and
internal simple web server (i.e., you can view the current
camera picture in a browser from any computer on the
network).