Webcam for security quick questions

[Frumpco_]

I am looking to put together a alittle box and a web cam to use to monitor my property I know that you can set it up so it can stream video (which eats up alot of resources) and can do still in XX number of secons to a website and can have it so that it is motion detectiond, but what I am looking to find out if I would like to have it update every few secs but for it not to delete the last pic untill 7 days so there will always bee a weeks worth of pics, I can manual delete these pics if need be but i Just need them to be saved somewhere, if anyone can give me a hand that would be GREAT Thanks for your help

[jajmon]

I did what you want to do about 3 years ago at work. The software that came with the camera allowed exactly what you want. I don't have that cam and software anymore. I'll see if I can come up with something.

[Zoplax]

There are some cool progs out there which will do motion capture; they'll only record when something is moving in front of the camera's field of view.

One of these is "GOTCHA!", another is "Remote Witness".

These let you take individual images, record video, exclude portions of the field of view from the area that triggers the recording, etc. Very nice!

Someone I know used one of these at an office on their PC, they recorded about five hours one workday of another employee just turning back and forth at their desk chair, talking on the phone with somebody. :)

[Frumpco_]

Zoplax

I assume that those programs sound great will have to try it out, any idea on how much room this average day would take up size wize? megs or gigs?

[JDXNC]

IF you have Windows Movie maker 2 installed in your computer it can do similar to what you want, setting it to low quality you can get weeks of video on an average HDD.

[Frumpco_]

Would a 6-10 gig do?

[Zoplax]

For image capture you can specify how large the images should be, what JPG quality, etc. For video, you can specify what codecs are used to encode and compress the video, so you could do anything from AVI to WMV with various levels of compression vs quality. No idea about an average day though; it would depend a lot on how colorful your capture area is, what video codecs you use, and how much activity is happening to trigger the capture.


Zoplax

I assume that those programs sound great will have to try it out, any idea on how much room this average day would take up size wize? megs or gigs?