HouseBot and WebCams

spike5884 · Post by **spike5884** » Thu Oct 07, 2004 10:06 pm

I am looking for suggestions on integrating webcams into housebot. For the most part I want to take some video when a motion detector goes off.

Thanks,

Scott J

Circe640 · Post by **Circe640** » Fri Oct 08, 2004 1:11 am

I am with you on this one for a different reason. Many receivers/scalers use toggles -- no discrete codes to bounce through their Surround/Output resolution modes. It would be nice to be able to mount a webcam to the front of the receiver's/scaler's LCD display and show it as a HB bitmap image. No need for continuous video, just snapshot on demand/timer

gorfllub · Post by **gorfllub** » Mon Oct 11, 2004 2:57 am

Yes. I too am having similar wishes. I have multi-channel video capture for security at home. This is what I would love:

Doorbell rings.

-> Front Door camera starts capture

-> Streams image to Pocket PC... Bingo... you can see who is there!

Manual camera controls would be cool too.

Also, if there is a security breach, (Alarm triggered) It would be nice for housbot to switch to the appropriate camera instantly.

spike5884 · Post by **spike5884** » Tue Oct 12, 2004 8:13 am

I found hope for an answer.

.. While looking for something else, I came across this post:

http://www.meedio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15123

It talks about using "Microsoft® Windows Media® Encoder 9" to handle the video. I got the encoder software downloaded, but have not had a chance to dive into it yet. I am in the middle of building my SageTV Client PC and rebuilding my SageTV Server. Once I get that up and working, I will get back to this and see what I can figure out.

-- Scott J

spike5884 · Post by **spike5884** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 1:50 pm

And we have success!!!

I got it figured out how to get HB to control webcams. It works for my set-up pretty good. I got a zip file ready to go that includes most of the needed stuff. The only part not included is an SDK that needs tp be downloaded from MS. I will send it to Scott to see if he can post it here. If you can't wait, PM/email me and I will send the zip to ya.

-- Scott J

boas999 · Post by **boas999** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 7:31 pm

A nice...this is how I put it all together would be nice...saves us another day that could be spend enjoying meedio iso configuring it

spike5884 · Post by **spike5884** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 7:54 pm

boas999 wrote:A nice...this is how I put it all together would be nice...saves us another day that could be spend enjoying meedio iso configuring it

It is included in the zip file. I spent a good deal of time getting this to work and creating an almost step-by-step document. Posting a few how-to thoughts here would not do the set-up justice and probably leave a lot of questions. So, if you are truly interested, send me your email address or wait for Scott to post the zip file.

Post by **ScottBot** » Sat Oct 23, 2004 10:42 pm

It looks great. Here's Scott's (spike5884) zip file for the web cam config.

yaccri · Post by **yaccri** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 2:32 am

Looks Great!

Now that's a good reason to get a webcam.

Apart from recording, is it possible to get a live view and playback with HB?

Yoram.