How to make a webcam page with Apache on Linux (obsolete)

How to make a page on your webserver displaying a picture of your webcam using Linux and Apache

This document describes, in short, how to make a page on your webserver to display a semi-continuous image of your webcam. This document is in fact, the documentation of such an installation on my machine running openSUSE 11.2 x86_64

The webcam involved is a Philips ToUCam Pro. In this example, it is connected directly to the webserver. But it is possible to have the image uploaded from another computer as well.

This solution uses a 2 stage approach, which makes it modular. The first stage/module captures images from the device using the commandline tool webcam and places the image in a directory, and the second stage/module is the HTML-page that publishes this image on a regular interval using a java applet (or you can go for a more simple solution and use a static page).

1st step: Check webcam.

check dmesg

pwc: Philips PCVC740K (ToUCam Pro)/PCVC840 (ToUCam II) USB webcam detected.

2nd step: install motion.

buildservice /etc/motion/motion.conf section image file output

output normal on -> off

section live webcam server

webcam port 8081
webcam quality 80
webcam localhost off

/var/run/motion/motion.pid

#mkdir /var/run/motion
#chmod 777 /var/run/motion