Webcam Faq's     WEB CAM  INTRODUCTION If you have been exploring the Web for any length of time, then you have run across any number of Web cams in your travels. Web cams range from the silly to the serious -- a Web cam might point at a coffee pot or a space shuttle launch pad. There are business cams, personal cams, private cams, traffic cams... you name it and there's probably a Web cam pointed at it! Have you ever considered setting up a Web cam yourself? You might want to create a silly cam by pointing it at your hamster or putting it inside your refrigerator. But it turns out there are lots of productive uses for Web cams, too. For example: You will be out of town for a week and you want to keep an eye on your house plants. You'd like to be able to check on the baby sitter and make sure everything is okay while you are at work. You'd like to know what your dog does in the back yard all day long. You want to let the grandparents watch the new baby during nap time. If there is something that you would like to monitor remotely, a Web cam makes it easy! The Basic Idea Web cams, like most things, range from simple to complex. Let's start with simple.      A simple Web cam consists of a digital camera attached to your computer. Cameras like these have dropped well below $100 and they are easy to connect through a USB port (earlier cameras connected through a dedicated card or the parallel port).       A piece of software connects to the camera and grabs a frame from it periodically. For example, the software might grab a still image from the camera once every 30 seconds.       The software then turns that image into a normal JPG file and uploads it to your Web server. The JPG image can be placed on any Web page.     If you don't have a Web server, several companies (like the makers of Webcam32) now offer you a free place to upload your images, saving you the trouble of having to set up and maintain a Web server or a hosted Web site. This is the simplest possible Web cam. Putting a standard JPG image into a standard Web page is straightforward, but it has the disadvantage that your readers must manually refresh the image.      Using a meta tag, a JavaScript function or a Java applet, it is possible to create a system that automatically refreshes the image for your readers. By clicking on the next page button below it will take you directly to our troubleshooting guide