static, live image serving on linux without funky applets

December 31, 2008 4:44 PM

On-demand webcam image serving on a linux server?

I have a webcam (logitech, usb) connected to a linux box. The webcam works well, but I'm having trouble finding a way to host it. Most software packages either stream the image (do not want) or upload/save an image periodically. I'd instead like to call a file I can wrap in an tag - a .jpg or even .php file that returns the image taken when the request was made. Any ideas?

posted by datacenter refugee to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Hooray for being lazy and wasting a question - webcamserver, which I've used before for streaming, returns a single image when accessed directly via http (http://servername:8888/).
posted by datacenter refugee at 5:43 PM on December 31, 2008

Seconding webcam-server. I've been using it for a few months now, and it does what you want (as well as streaming, and handling multiple cameras). For still images on demand, you just connect to something like mymachine.mydomain.com:8888, and it returns a jpg. In Ubuntu I use

sudo webcam-server -q 80 -v

although you can add options to, for example, set the image size.
posted by manyon at 5:45 PM on December 31, 2008