Welcome to Gaia :: Using webcam for surveillance

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There are several applications available to use your webcam as a security cam. Download.com has several (unsure of any free ones) and I personally use Active Webcam to monitor my garage with motion sensing recording.

There is a freebie I know of called Fwink but it's very limited. No motion capture but it can capture an image every X seconds and upload to a FTP server for secure off-site saving.

Although it is possible with a webcam I would not recommend it for the following reasons

1. should anything actually happen the resolution on most webcams are poor and it would be hard for the video to help you find people

2. You would need massive amounts of Harddrive space to record 24/7

3. your webcam could not be far from your computer therefore unless it was for your room/dorm it would not cover very much area

lol Well it seems someone is abusing the report system and reported my last post in here. Good luck when the mods get to you... rofl

As I said in the other post, I use a commercial webcam application called Active Webcam, but there is a freebie option called Fwink. Fwink doesn't have motion capture as Active Webcam uses but you can capture an image every X seconds and upload to a FTP server. It would be several Mb's a day with this option so you may want to consider looking through download.com for something else that can either do it for free or offer a decent trial period for the motion capture option.