I was happily using a USB webcam with a few issues, but fairly stable running, until someone with a much better view than me offered to put a webcam up, and upload the images to my server every minute. So today, all day, and half the night (so far) I’ve been trying to set things up this end so that I can put overlays on the image, and create an all day video. I’m using WD to download the image from the server every minute, and using the image in WD’s webcam capture instead of a webcam device, with the “Use image file instead” feature.
First of all this was working ok, but every so often it would connect to my usb webcam and capture that image instead of the downloaded image file. So I disconnected the usb webcam, but then it would switch to the analogue input on my Matrox video capture card, and capture the odd blank frame from that. So for some reason, when using the “Use image file instead” option to work with a downloaded image, it will try to revert to a capture device for one or two frames in say 20 or so. This is a major problem as I want to create all day videos, and these rogue frames make the video creation stage abort!
I’ve been trying every setting I can, and each time reverting back to the previous setup, but rather than stay the same, the problem has been getting worse to the point where I have been getting no frames from the image, and just hours of rogue frames. Despite that, the image updates in the preview window just fine, but when it takes a capture it’s trying to take it from a device. It’s as though the “Use image file instead” option is not disconnecting the devices, and is somehow conflicting. I have removed all the devices, and disabled the matrox card, but the issue still persists. The device opdown box is blank. In the activity list it sometimes shows up when it capturea rogue frame from a device, but most of the time it doesn’t, and most of the time in the preview window you can only see the actual image that I want which updates just fine. Mostly in the activity list it says “INFO th clip is not seekable”. I also occasionally get an error about a dll file for movie maker, and it tels me to run “regsvr32.exe C:\Windows\System32\qedit.dll” which I do, and it reports back that everything is ok.
The problem is very strange as it seems to suddenly get worse for no reason, and even rebooting doesn’t fix it. Then almost for no reason it will start working again for a while, then go wrong again!
Another problem that I have also been getting is the webcamimage.gif file will get updated every minute as instructed, but the webcamimage.jpg file only gets updated intermittently, or sometimes not at all - they should both get updated at the same time. Now since trying to fix these issues with out success, other things in WD have stopped working properly (and not for the first time). Some of the files uploaded by “Custom file creation and uploads” are not getting updated or uploaded any more, unless I rebuild and upload them manually.Yet other files are being built and uploaded just fine! Very strange.
Right now I am starting over from scratch with this remote webcam file, and just trying to get WD’s webcam system to update the jpg file. The .gif file is updating every minute, but the .jpg file now hasn’t updated for an hour.
I’m sure these issues must be bugs as there is no logic to them, and they are intermittent mostly.
I upgraded to the latest version of WD today trying to fix all this, so my current version is 10.37L build 03.