This is PC Based, but if you can do a little scripting it can run on any platform. I am basically doing a loop and using wget to obtain images. My video server is currently getting a few FPS per IP camera.

So step one is to have a scheduled task or cron job in startup doing wget to get your images.

Step two is to convert these into a video. I use mencoder to do this. This is available form any platform too. So there is a daily job which moves the JPGs into working directories for each camera, then use mencoder to combine the images into a video as described here; http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-enc-images.html

I have been doing this for several years with many cameras. Depending on how you configure the settings on the camera/wget/mencoder you can end up with: time lapse video a frame a minute real high quality, low size that looks nice; live video captured at several FPS depending on your bandwidth and CPU at whatever quality you want taking about a GB per day; and anything in between.

Some cameras will output gray scale images by night and color by day. mencoder will choke on those and stop encoding on the first image that is different. mencoder requires all images to be the same. If this is an issue you need to either normalize the images with something like my Irfanview sample, or setup the camera to always output the same image type. If your camera doesn’t do this, skip that step as it is very time consuming.

1. Is your web server a Windows, Mac, or Linux/Unix system? If Windows, then the axisgrab.py script would be able to grab the images from the camera, but might have trouble running mencoder to convert the images into a Flash video. If it’s a Mac or Linux/Unix system, then it’s a matter of getting PHP, Python, and mencoder installed on it.

2. Is this a cheap shared-hosting plan, or do you have a dedicated server? If the former, you may not have the ability to run the axisgrab.py script on a recurring basis. Ask your hosting provider if they support you running ‘cron’ jobs, assuming they’re not a Windows server shop. If they say no, then it’ll be difficult to get the images off the camera automatically.

As far as how to get it running, the best thing I can say is “one step at a time”. First, get axisgrab.py to grab an image off your camera and save it. Next, get axisgrab.py to encode the day’s images into an FLV. If both of those work ok, then it’s fairly simple to get JW Media Player set up to play a hand-typed playlist of FLV files (that you encoded with axisgrab.py). Finally, get index.php to create a playlist for JW Media Player from all the FLV files in your folder.

Each step has to be working properly before you go to the next step. I’m not really in a position to do side work, but you (or whoever you’re working with at your web host) can email me if needed (addresses on my “About Me” page).

And this definitely isn’t for people who have a shared host at some random web hosting service. For me, getting mencoder was a matter of adding a Debian-multimedia package source and installing it.