Webcam or no webcam?

[niko]

You could buy infinite bandwidth from your ISP, and provide free T1 connections and fast PC's to anyone who wants to look at your trees blowin' in the wind

[TNETWeather]

The reason why I have not bothered trying the WD solution is because my WD is running in a dedicated PC located inside my Computer Rack way against the far wall of my office.

The webcam is connected to my workstation (not where WD is) which is next to the window where the webcam is located.  Its about 3ft away from the box.

I also already owned a copy of several webcam packages, PySoft Active Webcam, ConquerCam and a few others so I really didn't need a WD solution.

[TNETWeather]

Tim,

Actually, your video is fine the way it is.  You are not using a $3k camera, nor do you have the bandwidth to broadcast DVD quality images.  But you are doing what the goal is... showing what your weather looks like.

The clouds whipping by and the movement of the trees give a good impression of what it is like outside.

It would be nice, if you could display the webcam without the big black border around it and the controls which are not really necessary to see the image, but I don't know if you can do that.

At least you have some weather to look at... all we have here today is plain blue skys...  I do have the WD-Car generator working though... you can see cars drive by occassionally to give it that real look.

[aifan27]

Thanks, Kevin.

When you say "display the webcam without the big black border around it and the controls", do you mean the area beneath the streaming video?  If so, I think you can remove that.

Do you think there is anything I should change about the image quality?  Brightness?  Hue?  Sharpness?

Thanks.

--Tim

[dknia]

In the wdwebcamcapture.exe program, the streaming video is amazing quality, but on my website, the streaming video quality is about half as good. 

OK.

I don't know if this is what you are referring to, but here goes anyway.

When the moviemaker generates the movie, it runs through all the jpg's as if they were a movie. It's actually just showing them as it takes them in to be processed to MPG and then to WMV. The jpg's in fast succession will obviously always look MUCH better than the resulting MPG file.

Maybe this is what you are referring to - maybe it's something similar in wdwebcamcapture, that I don't use (I use a netcam).

[TNETWeather]

Do you think there is anything I should change about the image quality?  Brightness?  Hue?  Sharpness?

Only you can make that decision Tim.

You need to play around with the settings to see if to you, it makes a difference.

That is how you learn, by experimentation... there are few things you can break outright... so experiment until you understand what does and does not work.

This is a hobby...

Without trying it yourself, you will forever need to ask someone else for the answer.   And many won't have time to answer because they are doing their own experimentation and learning how things work.

[aifan27]

Kevin,

I experimented () with the fps in the wdwebcamcapture.exe program and set it to the default (which is 5.00 fps).  Noticed that it does consistently use a bit more CPU, but I will see how that goes.

Looks much better now...http://www.newtownweather.com/wx21.html

--Tim

[Weather Display]

thats very good now Tim
is that using the network streaming ability built into wd's direct web cam program?

[aifan27]

thats very good now Tim
is that using the network streaming ability built into wd's direct web cam program?

Brian,

Yes, that's using the direct network streaming in WD.

--Tim

[Weather Display]

good stuff
what a powerfull and neat program weather display is 

[TNETWeather]

I agree.  The WD-Cloud Generator is working great today

http://www.tnetweather.com/webcams.php

We had only clear blue skys until I turned it on this morning.  Now we have a real weather look.  Its amazing how it effects the lighting just like when real clouds go by.