Discussion: Web Cameras ('webcams') have become an indisposable asset to the modern web. For example, I drive year-round by AWD throughout the western states, and find the omnipresent traffic cams of every state DOT (Department of Transportation) an invaluable resource for planning day-to-day travel in winter conditions. But beyond traffic cams, and the inestimable value of live video for the security of commercial and residential premeses, webcams simply provide us all with the ability to view the details of "where we are not".

I had the requirement in early 2010 to provide web camera coverage from several security cameras at a client's business premises. After looking into the capabilities of their somewhat dated switcher, I still found it straightforward to create and place a live webcam page on their site. Most modern switchers are even simpler than this turned out to be ;-)

Solution: Effectively all modern camera controllers ("switchers") provide the capability to stream video from their interconnected cameras to the internet. Each camera controller I've looked at presents a different interface capabilitiy set, but with a little flexibility on the part of the developer it's possible in nearly all cases to put existing camera(s) on the web.

Switchers tend to lie behind a residential-or-business firewall/router rather than being present at their webserver location, so it's simplest in this event to simply redirect port 80 (http) on the router at the camera location to a static IP address beyond the router's DHCP range, and set that in the camera controller as it's static ip address.

EXAMPLE

(The website which hosted this example was retired in June 2011.)