Here is what I want to do. I want a program that takes a capture off a live feed coming in from an ATI rage 64 or 128 video card with video inputs. I then want it to load this picture up to a webpage every 10 minutes or so.

We were using win98, and we had a program called easy free webcam, but this computer is to be located in the cayman islands and it locks up every two or three days. This is bad because I am in the US in alabama the rest of the time. I need this pc to run linux so it won't lock up. I am also fairly new to linux but I am becoming proficient very quickly.

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

there might be a better solution. but one solution i can think of is..

take a screenshot every 10min (using gimp)
and copy it to webpage directory.
u can do periodic copy with shell script or crond..

i'm not 100 sure that gimp can take snapshot periodically..
i don't have linux with me now.

good luck

"easy free webcam" man you gotta give credit to whoever thought for that.... blimey

yes, there are plenty of very easy solutions for linux. you want a program such as "motion" - specialised for motion detection, but works well as a general app as well. i've also tried camserv and camstream to vasrying levels of success.

how are you gettign the picture to the webpage? if it's a remote machine then i know one of those apps can upload to ftp. but if it's local, just copying to it should be no problem. indeed, if you're running linux i'd say just run apache on it for the hell of it...

these programs do of course work directly with the tv card itself, no screenshots etc. required...

It is on a remote machine. It is connected to a small home network w a DSL connection. I would just need a snapshot of the live feed taken every 10 minutes or so and the the pic loaded up to the ftp server every so often as well. I don't really want to set up the machine as a server on the internet. I just want it to upload a picture to a directory on my isp's server.

By the way, how would I schedule something to automatically execute every 10 minutes. Is this a cron job or something and if so how do I configure one?

Thanks again

Yeah as as acid_QP said you can use 'motion' which can take snapshots of the video source every N seconds. Just make sure that you don't record video as well or you'll fill your storage up in a hurry. You can also capture video from several different inputs.

As for pushing the picture to the remote server... I suppose you could write up a script to do this and make a cron job.

anyone have any links or suggestions for me as to how to write a cron script. I have never done this before but I really do want to learn how to do it.