kallasoft

Snapshot from palantir.santinoli.com:

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve dabbled with the idea to add a webcam to my personal site that monitored a couple of pet furballs. The task was not too straight forward. I ran into many hiccups with alpha software and missing libraries. Most of the software related to setting up a webcam server was severely outdated, and hadn’t received an update in many months. I tried camE and webcam (the two most standard daemon webcam servers), but they required far more thought in the security realm than I would have liked to invest in the project.

Minutes from assuming all was lost, I ran into a nice little piece of software named Palantir (yes, after that crystal ball thing in Lord of the Rings). The program was built with performance in mind, and can handle a fair load with old hardware. Offering streaming pix, sound, and even the ability to control (assuming you have the hardware) the motion of a camera, my search was finally at an end.

Adding a stream to my website was as easy as embedding an image in my webserver index.html file, and starting up the Palantir server. All you need is the address of the box running the server, and modifying the following line (replacing the 192.168.0.20 ip with your server’s address):

<img border="1" src="http://192.168.0.20:3000/" alt="[Live stream]">

You instantly have a live feed that will stay alive for the default 120 seconds. The project also gives you the ability to use a stand alone client instead of a browser to stream your shots (choose from a native QT linux app, a Java app, or even a Windows app).

You can see a demo stream where the above snapshot was taken at the Palantir site here. Check it out, and let us know what you think!