Working on Restarting the WebCam

As I have moved office, the webcam that I had operated from there needed to shut down. However, thanks to our IT support I have gotten another PC and am setting up now the webcam at its old location. There appears to be a problem with missing DLLs; I am investigating and hope to have soon agian the cam up and running. Stay tuned1!

Webcam Shutting Down on 2.November

From Monday morning (2.November 2009), 9:00, this webcam will be temporarily shut down due to office move.

After almost 3 years in office Caedmon 101 I will have to move to another office, because this current office is needed for other purposes because of its particular design. It has not yet been determined what will happen to this webcam: it might be possible that the camera can continue to run in this office. Alternatively it would be relocated to a slightly different viewpoint. This would, however, not be my new office, because that one does not have such a nice view: my new office just faces a parking lot behind the Caedmon Building.

I will keep you updated on the fate and the future of this webcam.

But for now: thanks to everyone who has viewed this website and has enjoyed the camera view!

Webcam server ok again

The server has now been completely upgraded. Image delivery works fine, the images are routed again to the Leeds Met server.

Temporary URL for webcam

Due to the server problems, I have moved the live webcam to another domain. The captured image as shown above is now at http://www.reinholdbehringer.co.uk/_LiveCam/index.php
If you have any links in your web pages, linking to the original site, you might want to update the URL to this one.

Server update - camera is out for a while...

On Sunday, 13.9., an upgrade of the basic server scripting components was carried out. For some reason, this affected the web cam software as well. I am investigating what the problem is.

Problems with Opera Browser on Windows Mobile

As I have just found out, the mobile webcam site that I wrote for displaying the webcam image on a mobile phone web browser does not work well on the Opera web browser (ver. 9.5, build 15445) on Windows Mobile 6.1.

With the default display setting "Mobile View" checked, the image is not shown at all. With the "Mobile View" unchecked, the image is shown, but the whole page is reduced to fit on the screen. This is independent of the setting "Automatic full screen".

The reason appears to be that Opera tells JavaScript an incorrect screen size. The screen on my mobile phone is 240 pixels wide, which is correctly reported by Mobile Internet Explorer. But Opera reports 480 pixels wide. This leads to a too large request of the image, which then is squeezed onto the narrow screen, by reducing also the rest of the web site (text from this blog). Therefore, the text becomes unreadable.

Also, in the process of the size reduction, Opera adds white space to the side of the image. hereby not only reducing it by a factor 2 from 480 to 240 pixels, but reducing it even further, although the web page is set up to show the image as 100% of the page width. Works ok in any browser on a regular PC, but Opera here does something wrong.

The mobile webcam site appears to work correctly as intended on MS Mobile Internet Explorer.

Camera Outage

During the summer break, the camera had been running fine, until on 21.August, 7:04, the server restarted. I will have to identify why this happened. Since I was not here to restart also the capture software, the web cam website only displayed the last captured image from that morning.

It is up and running now, currently capturing at a rate of 1 picture per minute, without saving the image series.

Capture Outage Today

Today at 11:20 I had to re-login on the capture PC with another user account name, and therefore had to shut-down and restart the camera capture software. In the course of starting it up, I had put an incorrect FTP password in the parameters... and so the images were captured and stored in a series, but were not uploaded to the webserver. Apologies for this mishap!

This makes me consider to develop a remote control for the camera captue software. I noticed the problem already around 12:30, but was unable to fix it as I was at an out-of-office location. Such a remote control could be web-based and would allow to reconfigure the camera capture module. The next version will have such a remote control.

Free Software Available

This week with its demand on the server and on the capture software was useful for beta-testing the software I wrote for the capture.

I prepared a web site for easy access of this software: http://creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/software/.

One software is the capture software itself (which I already announced here earlier). It can be used by anyone who has a PC and wants to capture single images to be ftp-ed onto a web server.

The other piece of software is a small client which takes an image from a remote web server and places it onto the Windows desktop. It is pre-configured to use this Headingley Caedmon Webcam, but can be set to any web URL with an updated image.

--- NO WARRANTY AND SUPPORT WILL BE GIVEN ON ANY OF THESE SOFTWARE PRODUCTS - USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!---

(But if you find a bug, you are welcome to let me know so that I can fix it. Also, if you have a question, do not be intimitated to ask; if I have time, I will certainly help)

Graduation is over - Dismantling the Marquee

The graduation week is over, the students, staff, and guests have left the white Marquee, and the dismantling crews are already emptying the inside installations. The first 4 days the weather has been reasonable, with sunny spells. But today on Friday there was wind and rain.

Time-lapse capture has been done during the week, with the goal to create videos of the activities. Now, the camera has turned again to focus solely on the Acre which will appear once the Marquee has been dismantled. The camera capture rate has been set slower now, to one picture every 5 minutes, and image series will be stored to create a time-lapse video of the Marquee dismantle process and the re-claiming of the Acre.

Next year, according to informal sources, there will be no Marquee here on the Acre, so this is now the last time for a while that this sight is here.

The rain is pounding down on the empty campus, as the students with their guests have left and staff is mostly going on holiday for the next few weeks.

An academic year is over.

Update of Server Scripts

The increased demand of the image capture on our server due to the link to the Leeds Met public web site made it necessary to provide an update to the server code which would improve the "garbage collection" of temporary image files. This has now been implemented. There was a brief outage during the transition to the new version. If there appears a "not found" error, just refresh the whole page, and the image should be there again.

Webcam now on Official Leeds Met Site

The Headingley Caedmon Webcam is now included in the official web site of the Leeds Met Summer Graduation 2009, in the latest news page. The update rate has been increased to one image every 15 seconds.

Increased Framerate

To reflect the importance of the graduation event, the framerate of the web cam capture has been increased to one picture every 20 seconds. This provides a more fluent image capture.

Capture Software Available

The camera capture software is now at a stage that I think it can be distributed - without warranty!

A link for automatic installation is available here (works properly only in Microsoft Explorer).

The software comes without any instructions - I hope that its use is self-explanatory. I will post within the next few weeks some guidance notes about how to configure it properly, but for now I do not have the time to do this. It has been tested only on Windows XP, and only with 3 cameras: Microsoft LifeCam VX-600, Philips ToUCam Pro, and Phillips SPC 200NC.

In principle, the software allows to capture one individual image at a preset time interval, which it stores as a JPG file locally. After the saving, it can also FTP the file to a remote web server, and it can put it on the user's desktop as a background image.


Just a few notes for configuration here:

After start, the software will try to connect to the first camera it finds. If no camera is connected, then it runs a detection thread in the background which will connect to a camera once it is plugged in. So a "hot-plugin" works, but not a hot-plug-out - once a camera is connected, the software will get an error when the camera is unplugged during operation.

If several cameras are connected, the user can chose one with "Devices". The compressors there have not been tested - it is recommended to leave them at "none".

The "Options" menu allows to access specific camera options. These are provided by the camera drivers and are unfortunately not stored, so each time the software is restarted, these options have to be selected again.

Do not use the "Audio Capture" - this is not yet implemented.

The "Video" tab shows the live video from the camera in preview mode. A few cameras allow the selection of the capture size with the combobox, but this is not working very stable - it is better to select the image capture size and the framerate with the Options>PropertyPages dialogs.

The actually captured single image can be shown in a "separate window" and also can be placed on the "desktop" as a background.

The "Timer" tab allows to control the timer for the single image capture: the capture rate is set by the interval between the image captures, and the file name for this image and its location directory can be selected. An image series can be stored by automatically adding a number to the images, and the starting number can be entered. There is also a start/stop timer for indicating time of series capture in case of absence. And with a check box, the image can be automatically sent to an FTP server.

The "FTP" tab allows the configuration of an FTP server: server name, user name and password can be set. Further, the remote folder on the server can be set. Precede the folder directory by "//" for an absolute path from the server root; otherwise the "home" directory of the server for the particular user will be used as a root. The local directory can be also set here - it is usually the directory where the capture software stores the captured file.



Again, no warranty, and no support for using this software!!!

Capture Irregularities

Due to software upgrades, it has not always been possible to maintain a framerate of one picture every 30 seconds. Also, this morning the PC rebooted around 7:05 am, which stopped the capture process until restart at 9:30.

Since then a new version of the capture software has been installed, which has a few improvements on the back-end interface (no change in the web image distribution). The latest software running now is 1.0.1.57.

Graduation this Week

This week, every day a graduation ceremony is taking place here in the white marquee in front of the James Graham Building at the Headingley Campus of Leeds Met. The web cam is now set to capture every 30 seconds, and the images during the day are stored. If you want your picture taken by the webcam, just pose anytime at the black pillars on the driveway. Please contact me then by leaving a comment to this post, with your email address and the precise time when you think you were at the picture.

Open Day at Headingley Campus

Today is Open Day at the Headingley Campus. The white marquee is being used to its fullest extent, many visitors are here.

The camera viewpoint has been changed slightly towards the right, to show less of the marquee tent, but more of the James Graham Building.

Webcam Outage

On 2. July 2009, 7:05, the PC was for some reason rebooting. Since I was not available for logging in, the image capture had been interrupted since then, and it only resumed after I restarted the PC yesterday on Monday, 6.July.

The image capture is now running at an increased frame rate of 1 pic per minute. There is no longer a storing of each image, as the time lapse sequence for building the marquee has been completed. I will switch the recording on again next week for the graduation ceremonies, with an increased framerate of one picture every 30 seconds.

Camera Paused for two Days

On Wednesday evening, right in the final preparations for my upcoming travel, I found an email in my inbox, from webcams.travel, where I had registered our Leeds Met Caedmon webcam: the email stated that the status of my webcam has changed, and that it was not active. That surprised me a little, because I had just seen it running ok before I left office. So I checked the live image on our web site - and indeed, it showed a picture from Tuesday morning! Since I had seen the capture on my PC working ok, I concluded that the problem must be with the ftp process onto the web server.

So just before travelling to the airport at 3:00 am, I stopped at Uni, asked the guards to let me into my office, and had a look at my PC. Indeed, the capture software was running fine, the image sequences were captured ok. But for some reason the check box for "ftp image" was unchecked... I corrected this and left for the airport.

Apologies to everyone for this mishap. The camera is now running ok. Fortunately the image series capture had been running all along, so there is no problem of missing images when I will assemble the time lapse series video.

Slower Capture Framerate

The web camera framerate had been set to 1 picture per minute, and all images since the beginning of the Marquee construction have been saved.

From tomorrow on (Thursday, 18.7.) I will be on travel for a few days, and in order to avoid a problem due to the HD filling up, I have reduced the capture frame rate to 1 picture every 5 minutes. Everybody who is using the widget for this camera on their website, will get the new framerate set automatically.

Current image setting is 640x480.

The current version of the software is 1.0.0.374 - a small bugfix has been applied to correct an error in the automatic image numbering while saving an image series.

Sometimes Over-Exposure of Cam Image

The webcam sometimes does not properly expose the image. This happens despite all setting being on automatic. Most often this happens when the frame rate is set quite low: at 5 fps this seems to happen constantly, while it very rarely happens at 30 fps.

Today early aftenooon I noticed this overexposer and have reset the framerate from 5 to 30 fps - now the exposer appears to be ok.

Preparation for the Graduation Marquee

This morning, the Acre has been fenced off, for the preparation of the building of the Marquee. Yesterday I had turned the camera towards the Acre, to show how students are enjoying the warm and sunny weather in the grass.

I now leave the camera pointed towards the Acre, and I have set the camera to record the images in a series. This will document the building of the marquee from the very beginning.

Viewing on Mobile Phone

A new portal to the webcam image has been installed, allowing access through mobile phone (currently only tested on Windows Mobile):

http://creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/m/webcam.php

The script for this page has been radically simplified, for fast loading and wide compatibility. It embeds the usual IFRAME method for including the picture and is therefore also automatically refreshing. The image size is automatically adjusted to the browser window size.

This access portal works also on any other web browser on a "normal" PC, providing just a simple window with the webcam image only.

New Script Version

The PHP script for sending out the captured image on request has been modified:

• The maximum sent image dimensions have been increased from 640x480 to 1280x1024. The previous version only sent 640x480, even if the originally captured image would have been larger.


• The refresh time has now been changed from a fixed value of 60 seconds to a variable value. The value depends on the time since the most recent image was captured and is set to twice the time difference between now and the file date of that image. A limiter sets the range of this refresh time result from 5 seconds to 10 minutes, to avoid either too rapid refresh or too long delays. This will now enable the distribution of image capture to be adapted automatically to the speed of the actual image capture. To show the currently used refresh rate, the caption text line has been amended.


• The size of the output image is now limited to the actual captured image size.

All these measures are seamless, because the next image refresh through the IFRAME will refresh the whole script, so that these new features are immediately available for anyone who has implemented the IFRAME image capture on their web site.

New Capture Software Version

A brief outage today from 10:03 until 11:17 was caused by an upgrade of the capture software. The new version has no effect on the captured web image, but only provides some improvements for the GUI. There is now an optional real-size preview, showing exactly the image that was captured. Earlier versions had a scaled down preview which fits on the small Dialog window.
A problem had occured in handling the video property pages. It appears that parameters that have been set within the property pages are lost when the video device is opened again. A work-around has been implemented avoiding multiple initialisations of the video.

Anyway, it works fine now :)

New Webcam: 1280x1024 capture

The previous webcam has now been replaced by the Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000. This camera has a much larger wideangle field of view, which now allows to see the front of the James Graham building (to the right) and part of the Acre (to the left). It also can capture at a high resolution: it is currently set to the maximum at 1280 x 1024 pixels.

Image from the MS LifeCam VX-6000:



Image from Philips ToUcam Pro:



Image from the Philips SPC 200NC camera (here only 320x240):



Also, the capture software is constantly being revised and updated, as the development for this tool provides me with additional code for other projects. The current revision 104 allows to select a camera from a set of connected cameras, makes accessible the property pages, and allows to set a compressor.

Change of Camera

Yesterday I connected again the Philips ToUcam Pro to the video capture. It provides a better image quality, despite the problem with the vertical stripes in high contrast. Right now the weather is foggy and hazy, so not much contrast.

The new version of the video capture software was extended to include the property pages. This now allows again to set the image size. These past few days it has been set at 320x240; now it is set to 640x480.

Setting up a Microsoft LiveCam VX-6000 did not work yet, as the USB cable is too long, and as a consequence too little power arrives at the camera (needs 500 mA at 5V). I will have to add a USB power booster. This camera would allow 1280x1024 image capture, at a much better quality than the current capture.

New Version of Capture Software

I have rewritten the complete capture software for grabbing the webcam image and ftp-ing it to the web server. This was necessary, as the old code in Visual C++ v.6 become difficult to handle. Also, I wanted finally to have a video capture class in C# for my further software development activities.

For the webcam functionality and the outer web interface there is no difference: the image is captured as before and uploaded to the server.

Only on my desktop there is a difference: instead of a separate capture window (from the old VideoForWindows preview window) there is now the preview included into the GUI of the main window. The tabbed controls look much cleaner now. The FTP client shows status messages. And I do now have C# classes for video capture and FTP upload.

Hopefully this new version runs as reliable as the previous version!

Change of Camera

The web cam which had been used since the server has been set up, displayed some visual artefacts in areas of high contrast. I have now replaced this camera with another one which does not seem to have this problem. Unfortunately, the image quality is more blurry than the precious camera, and the lens has a smaller aperture angle, which means that a smaller segment is shown. But it seems to have a backlight compensation, which may be useful in the evenings when the camera points in the direction of the sun.

Webcam up again

After the crash of my PC last week, I now have a new one. The boot HD had failed, for some unexplainable reason. Got the new PC yesterday, and today I set up the camera capture.
There is an inexplicable problem: the newer versions of the camera capture software do not work anymore: no video device is being recognised. Strangely enough, the version 1.6 from 7.April 2008 (exactly one year ago) works just fine. So I am reverting to running that one, before I identify and fix the problems of the latest version. The frame rate is now set to 2 minutes, to keep the likelihood for potential problems down. Will be increased when a stable camera capture will have been developed.

I hope to leave the camera running over the Easter holiday.

Happy Easter to everyone!

Server Down

On Saturday, 28.3.2009, 2:27am, something must have happened to the server where the camera video capture is running: the capture stopped grabbing and updating images. It was noticed during the day that the PC appeared to have rebooted, but an HD failure did not allow the boot process to complete.

So at the moment, the camera server is down, until the hard drive has been fixed.

Camera Stopped

This afternoon, 15:38, the software for capturing the continuous image from my web cam stopped operating. My PC did have some trouble around that time, applications running sluggish. But I noticed the web cam failure just now... so am rebooting now, the camera should be up in a few minutes again.

Happy New Year!

The web cam and the server appear to have been running fine during the holiday shutdown.

Happy New Year 2009 to all of you!