How would I go about streaming a webcam to a website and then let the visitors to watch it?

Question

I am interested in writing my own software to do this. What will I need in particular? Is it hard to do or not that hard?

Answer 1

You can use Tincam (shareware, free to try, $19 to buy). You will have to setup your computer to be accessible from the internet, which may be hard, but this article from maximumpc will walk you through the process with Tincam and setting up your computer to do this.

The advantage of this route is you won't have to pay a ton of money to have a off-site web server serve your webcam for you.

Answer 2

One pretty simple solution would be to set up a simple web page which will display an image in it and will auto-refresh (either with javascript or a meta tag). Then, you need to update this image periodically.

The exact implementation depends on many factors. To mention a few:

• Is the webcam connected on the webserver?
• Can it be connected to the network and export a stream of the captured video?
• With which programming languages are you familiar?

Answer 3

Maybe you can use the Nimbb API to do this.