New Software Version - and Additional Location

The capture software has been upgraded to allow a slightly easier use.

In addition, a second instance of the webcam has now been set up in my office, showing a view onto the parking lot between Caedmon Hall and Priestley Hall. This webcam will not be advertised much, but will be embedded in a few of my sites for esperimentation. It also will allow me to test new features before releasing them onto the main webcam which points to the Acre.

Webcam at Temporary Location

A happy New Year 2010 to everyone!

In the past two months the webcam has been down. The reason for this was that a new PC had to be used in order to keep the webcam at the same location, and there were some issues regarding the installation of that software which I had no time to address, due to other work that I had to do. I am now addressing these issues, and I hope to have the webcam up and running again at the previous location.

As a temporary fix, I am now using the previous PC where the functioning release of the capture software is running. This does NOT point to the Leeds Met Acre and the James Graham building, but points instead to the parking lot between the Caedmon and Priestley buildings. This view is less attractive than the front view of the James Graham building, but since it is currently snowing, the view is not that bad.



The issue regarding the software is quite strange: despite having installed the latest .NET releases, the installation routine requires some particular files to be installed. It could be that these are a part of MS Visual Studio, which had been installed on both the PCs where I had developed and used the webcam before. I hope to figure this out soon. In the meantime, the camera will be operational from this view behind Caedmon Hall. The building in sight (to the right) is Priestley Hall. In the background on the left you can see the Metceno building. And at the extreme right there is a part of Caedmon Hall.

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.