Many people have asked for advice about how to set up a webcam in their garden. These notes are intended to help answer this question and give some of the background to our own website.
When setting up a webcam, you need to think about many different things. These include the camera you are going to use, how it is to be connected to your computer, what software you are going to use to capture the images and how you are going to make these available to viewers over the internet.
The commonest webcam set-up used today consists of a camera sitting on top of your PC so that you can see as well as chat to other people. It is usually connected to your PC via a USB port. This type of set-up is not appropriate for use for a wildlife webcam.
A wildlife webcam will normally be outside and installed some way from your PC. It must therefore use a weatherproof video camera or one housed in a weatherproof housing. The camera we use for our bluetit webcam is housed within the roof cavity of the bluetit nest box, and this is dry enough for our purposes. We also have a camera in a weatherproof housing that is installed on the garage roof so that we can train it onto the entrance of the second nest box in order to see what his happening outside the box. If we had had that last year we would have seen the greater spotted woodpecker stealing Fluffy's chicks! Finally, we have a small weatherproof camera that we use to catch a glimpse of a fox that comes into our garden at night, searching for food. Whilst the bluetit cameras are colour, this one is black and white and works using an infra red light.
You can find suppliers of such cameras on the web. An example of such a supplier is Henry’s CCTV Centre (http://www.cctv-centre.co.uk/).
The distance of the camera from the PC means that you cannot use a USB camera as this will only work with a cable length of up to three metres. Your video camera will need to be connected to your PC by a video cable (eg a coax cable) and also use a cable supplying power to the camera. If you are recording sound as well, then you may need additional links for this. It is possible to get video cable that has spare wires that can be used for power for the camera as well as the video signal, the advantage being that one cable is easier to install tidily than two!
Finally in this section, you will need to install a video capture card on your PC so that you can connect the video cable to it. Initially, we used a Win TV card from Hauppauge. However, we are now using the Picolo video capture card from Euresys as this has proved to be more flexible. We also have a couple of Osprey video capture cards from Viewcast that we expect to be using in addition later this year as the action hots up! Both these cards give a superb picture and are much better, though more expensive, than the WinTV card we first used.
You will need some software to grab the images from your camera and control their transfer to the web. We use software from i-Catcher (http://www.icode.co.uk/icatcher/) and this flexible software enables us to run in various modes. We use the motion detecting software to take and store pictures when the image changes significantly inside our nest boxes and we use their built-in Web Viewer facilities to show live pictures on the web. i-Catcher are also agents for ViewCast in the UK so that you can get their range of Osprey video capture cards from them also.
Clearly, if you are running a webcam, you will need to be connected to the web while you are showing off your pictures! Although theoretically this could be done with a dial-up link, in practice if you want your webcam to be available for long periods of time you will need a permanent cable or broadband connection. You have a choice, however, of whether you write your webcam image to the web space you have on your ISP's computers, or run a piece of server software on your own computer.
Using your ISP's space has the advantage that they carry the load if your images prove popular, however, this can be a disadvantage as your ISP may start threatening excess charges if your site proves too popular.
i-Catcher's software has a built-in HTTP server, which enables you to offer your images to the world directly from your own PC. If you are going to use this, it helps if your ISP has given you a static IP address, so that your viewers know where to find you.
When we first started we knew little of the technologies involved and got going quickly by buying a total package solution. This consisted of a bluetit nest box and camera from BoxWatch (http://www.boxwatch.co.uk/). Our video card was the ATI All-in Wonder Radeon, which also had a video input and we used this to capture our images. We bought i-Catcher Wildlife for its motion detecting capabilities, and then launched the webcam when we found what it could do.