Simple Webcam Capture
At home I wanted to keep an eye on some builders who were carrying out some work on the house. I found a few freeware/shareware apps for webcam captures that worked pretty well, but then I realised how much CPU they were using. My server is only a 600Mhz box; it’s a fileserver and therefore doesn’t need to be beefy! It averaged out at about 80-90% utilisation which seemed excessive.
Despite taking snapshots from the camera every few seconds, it’s actually on all the time.. this is what’s causing the CPU usage to be so high.
It’s a simple app with some simple features:
Lowers CPU usage by switching off the webcam between snapshots
Use any standard windows capture device
Capture to a file as a BMP or JPEG image
Specify a flexible filename
Give the image a caption
Specify the frequency of snapshots
Can be used via the command line
Captures can be triggered via hotkey
Execute a file after each snapshot is taken (optional of course)
This last feature is great for those of you who love scripting & macros. You can pass through the name of the snapshot that’s just been taken (by specifying %1) and do whatever you like.. FTP the file, SMS it to your phone, run a batch conversion so that a bunch of JPEG images are compiled into an AVI… it’s up to you. File Mover also has this feature with an example .VBS script.