Tips to Set-up a Live Webcam

Look around and you will find web cameras everywhere nowadays. The college or university you attend has one (or many), your office has one for teleconferencing and your friends have one. To go along with the crowd, you have decided to get a video web cam for yourself. Now what? You get your webcam home and connected to your computer workstation. You may be wondering how you turn your new gadget into a live webcam online. Read further to get a better understanding of personal web cams.

The biggest decision you need to make before making your camera live is if you will show still images or streaming video. Visit a webcam directory like Online Camera and take a look at a few webcams. You may notice that some of them show a video feed that is a continuous stream of live video, while others simply refresh the page of the browser and show a succession of still pictures at intervals.

Streaming video is, without a doubt, more appealing to a viewer. The question is though; can you support a network camera such as that? If you can afford setting aside a tremendous amount of bandwidth for your video web cam to stream and you also have a broadband internet connection, then your answer is yes.

If your answer is no, then you need to stick with a still image camera. They make the process easier for both you and your camera's viewers. This type of connection can work without any problems, whether you access the internet through a dial-up connection or a high speed broadband connection. A still image camera allows you to display images with a much higher picture quality that are larger and not grainy. The big difference is that a video web cam shows a moving and fluid stream of images, whereas still images do not flow the same way.

Next, you should consider the size of the pictures taken by video webcams. The bigger the image is, the slower the refresh rate. The image might look good to you, but it can be difficult for users with slow internet connections to view it. Ask a friend with an internet connection to test your live webcam before you make it public.

If you don't have any friends to help you with your experiment, then keep the following tips in mind: the bigger the image, the slower the refresh rate will be. The maximum refresh rate for a 320 x 240 pixel image is around 20-30 seconds. For a faster rate, the image size needs to be reduced. A 160 x 120 pixel image can be refreshed every 10 seconds. That is also a good size if you plan on using live streaming video. It allows users who have a slower internet speed to view your live webcam without any glitches.