Been a while since I posted here, eh? As it happens, I've been deeply engrossed in a little toy that grew into a real project.

I've always been disappointed in the lack of decent streaming webcam software. Everyone and their dog has written a "grab an image and FTP it somewhere" app, usually complete with a crappy, useless GUI. (All you people who remember Cyclops are nodding your heads and thinking, "Yeah Nathan, you're one to criticise crappy webcam servers.") Some people go so far as to write a custom Java/ActiveX applet to pull down images real fast for kind of a redneck "streaming" effect. (Carson calls this "faux streaming".) The closest I've seen to live video is the HTTP multipart/jpeg streaming implemented by camserv and the Axis network cameras. This works, to some extent, but there's just something repulsive about shovelling JPEGs down a TCP socket as fast as possible and calling it "live video".

Come on, people! For decades we've had video compression techniques that are specifically designed to push live video down small pipes. And protocols for streaming real-time multimedia over IP networks have been standardized for over 10 years. The folks lucky enough to have multicast IP access have been holding multi-user video conferences since before most of the world had even heard the word "Internet". So why on Earth should we put up with the equivalent of mailing Grandma a stack of Polariods and telling her to flip through them really fast?

Before you say anything, don't give me that "widest possible audience" crap. I know you want your webcam to be accessible to anybody with a web browser, but how many people do you know who don't have QuickTime installed? Seriously, everybody who didn't have QuickTime installed already went and installed it to watch the Lord of the Rings trailer. And if they didn't care about the LotR trailer, they don't deserve to watch your webcam anyway.

OK, so where was I? Right—my point was that we already have the technology, standards, infrastructure, and most importantly the viewing software in place to start feeding people quality live video from our homes and offices. All we need is the server software. So, properly motivated by such an obvious need, I wrote some.

Spook is my attempt at a decent live streaming video solution. It captures video from Firewire cameras, compresses it to MPEG4 with XviD, and streams it (via unicast, no multicast required) to anybody who asks for it using RTSP. The result: true live video at 30 frames per second with a resolution of 320x240. In half the upstream bandwidth of the average cable modem. Now that is what I'm talking about.

Today was the first release of Spook. It only supports Firewire cameras for the moment, so I'm sure I'll get a few more folks interested once I support Video4Linux and all the TV capture cards and USB webcams it brings. The problem with V4L is that configuration for each camera chipset is different, so it may be a bear to support configuration of FPS and all that. I'll find out soon, I guess.