[thelist] Novex 2000 - webcam software

Melody Kerchhoff mel at kingsley.co.za
Thu Sep 27 04:05:45 CDT 2001


Hello Listlings,

I sent a query about this before and received some excellent advice
regarding Webcam 32 software. Anyway, at the time I did not know what
software my client had etc. and I now have some more information and have
some more specific questions. I have approached Novex themselves as well,
but thought I would try the trusty list in the meantime for some unbiased
opinions.

A client of mine has four cameras on his house and he would like pictures
from those cameras to be made available on his web page. He is running the
Novex 2000 software. http://www.novexcanada.com/overview.htm I am a web
designer and have never worked with web cams before and am not familiar with
the Novex 2000 software.

However, I have been to the house and had a look at the software and what I
have managed to find out is the following:
1. Novex 2000 does allow scheduled recording, but does not seem to allow a
scheduled snapshot. The help file says that you can grab a frame when you
are in video playback mode but not when you are in recording mode. The
shortest recording I was able to make was 5 minutes. Is it possible to
record for shorter periods? Ideally I would like to record a single frame as
a snapshot once an hour and save it as a jpg. Does the software only save
video files e.g. avi?
2. I need to schedule the computer to dial-up once an hour to FTP this jpg
to an ISP. Novex 2000 seems to enable the computer running the software to
be set up as a web server, but this is not what the client wants. The
computer will be not be online all the time. Can Novex 2000 be set up to do
scheduled FTP uploads?

I hope this makes sense. To recap, what the client requires is for the
software to grab a snapshot from each of the 4 cameras once an hour during
the daylight hours. The PC must dial-up at scheduled hourly intervals soon
after the snapshot has been grabbed to FTP it to the ISP. Preferably this
will be in jpg format and preferably it will have a generic name like
camera1.jpg so that it overwrites the jpg that was there before. I will then
display these pictures on the web page.

Is this possible with Novex 2000? If not, do you know of any other software
that does this that you can recommend? This whole process has to be
automated and I can't see that it is possible to do it with the Novex 2000
that he has at the moment. Please tell me I am wrong : ) Am I missing the
point entirely? Is there a much easier way to do this? Any advice would be
appreciated.

Regards,
Melody Kerchhoff





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