Weather Cam Update!

Right... after a number of teething problems with the weather cam, mainly the fact the software kept freezing and not updating the image, I have decided to try a different piece of software to stream my webcam to the internet.  I found another free piece of software called Web Cam XP which so far has done a much more reliable job of streaming pictures to the internet.  Its been running for approx 10 hours now without failure whereas I found Yawcam would stop streaming after about 2 hours, which is a shame because its a really good little program.

I've kept Yawcam for uploading pictures at intervals to my ftp server and for keeping pictures as a record of the weather on my PC.  WebCamXP's support of individual images wasn't as comprehensive or easy to operate as Yawcams.

Weather Cam Update

I started to tweak the resolution/bit rate settings of the video to try and give a better picture.  Although setting MPEG4 and MJPEG resolutions to their highest setting did increase picture quality marginally, it also resulted in two days of faffing about.  The camera kept freezing and apparently dropping out of range. I thought this might be due to the distance between my wireless router and the IP cam, so set about utilising one of my old routers as a wireless access point (yes you can actually do that, I'll explain how another time) but not before moving the router about my office, totally rearranging furniture etc etc etc.. before recalling it all worked perfectly fine before I'd adjusted the resolution settings.  Return the resolution settings to "normal" from "very high" and hey presto.. the IP cam works fine.  2 days wasted.  I'm guessing the problem was down to bandwidth so if you suffer intermittent coverage and repeated failure of your wireless IP camera try your resolution settings before setting off on a pointless 2 day "changing rooms" adventure.