Setting up linux webcam server

Juho Launonen & Sami Kulmala

At the beginning we...

Created new virtual machine with default settings and linux debian distro

Installed apache and loads of other stuff Connected webcam Got nice feed from the camera Tried to set up the server

Then the problems started

It appeared that the v4l (video for linux), which is a video capture application programming interface for Linux, did not work for us at all

That's when the shit hit the fan Nothing was working properly and we were

desperate After 16 hours and thousands of useless attempts

it was time to start all over again with a new distro...

Installing Ubuntu

So...

Ubuntu server was succesfully installed with GUI Apache was installed

sudo apt-get install apache2

Webcam server package sudo apt-get install webcam-server

Configuration

We had to make startup script for the webcam server so that we could control it as a daemon and start it at startup

We made the following script to the /etc/init.d directory...

#!/bin/sh

SERVER_BIN=webcam-serverLOCK_FILE=/var/lock/$SERVER_BINRTRN=0OPTIONS='-v -g 640x480 -p 8888 -c JUMI'

start() {

[ -f $LOCK_FILE ] && echo "$SERVER_BIN already started"[ -f $LOCK_FILE ] && return

echo -n "Starting $SERVER_BIN: "export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.sonohup $SERVER_BIN $OPTIONS > /dev/null 2>/dev/null &RTRN=$?[ $RTRN -eq 0 ] && echo Started! || echo FAIL[ $RTRN -eq 0 ] && touch $LOCK_FILE}

stop() {[ -f $LOCK_FILE ] || echo "$SERVER_BIN is not running"[ -f $LOCK_FILE ] || returnecho -n "Stopping $SERVER_BIN: "pkill -f "$SERVER_BIN $OPTIONS"RTRN=$?rm -f $LOCK_FILE[ $RTRN -eq 0 ] && echo Stopped! || echo FAIL}

case "$1" instart)start;;stop)stop;;restart)stopstart;;*)echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"RTRN=1esac

exit $RTRN

Configuration

With following commands we made the startup script run when Ubuntu starts up

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/webcam-server sudo update-rc.d webcam-server defaults

Now everything was ready for a little test so we started the webcam server

sudo /etc/init.d/webcam-server start

IT'S WORKING!

Juho was pretty scared when he realized that

http://localhost:8888/

Webcam stream to a webpage

To use the webcam stream on a webpage we had to copy the necessary java files to our webroot

sudo cp /usr/share/doc/webcam-server/applet/* /var/www/

Then we made webpages with following applet for the camera

<APPLET CODE = "WebCamApplet.class" archive="applet.jar" WIDTH = "640" HEIGHT = "480">

<param name=URL value="http://<OUR_IP>:8888">

<param name=FPS value="60">

<param name=width value="640">

<param name=height value="480">

</APPLET>

That's it!

Now lets see that amazing site!