How to use a webcam as a home security camera

Over the years as I’ve acquired vari­ous bits of hard­ware, I’ve some­how ended up with a few ‘extra’ web­cams. Not really want­ing them to lan­guish in my parts bin, I figured I’d take a stab at set­ting them up as home secur­ity cam­er­as. And, I wanted to check out what my dogs were up to dur­ing the day 🙂
My kit­chen was the per­fect test area, as I already had a win­dows-based PC there. All I needed to add were some USB Exten­sion cables and I was set. So for you list-minded folk, here’s what I used:

• ASRock Ion 330 — PC run­ning Win­dows XP SP2
• Logit­ech Quick­Cam Connect
• Microsoft Life­Cam VX-3000
• Belkin USB Exten­sion Cable — 6ft

I posi­tioned the cam­er­as where I’d have a good view of the floor-space and entrance. It takes a bit of tri­al and error to get the right angle and in one case I had to use a weight to keep the Logit­ech Cam­era in place…the twists of the cable would­n’t let the cam­era sit flat.

On the soft­ware side, I chose to go with an online solu­tion,  HomeCamera.com. This was much sim­pler than set­ting up a home web serv­er and web­cam cap­ture solu­tion. I wanted some­thing that was pretty much plug-and-play.

Our sub­scribers use Home­Cam­er­a’s built-in motion detec­tion for secur­ity cam­er­as, to receive image and video intru­sion alerts on their email and mobile phones. Fea­tures like auto­mat­ic record­ing sched­ules enable you to see what happened in your home through­out the day, even while you’re on an out-of-town work trip. Busi­ness cus­tom­ers use Home­Cam­era to watch over their factor­ies, their shops, ware­houses, and more.

Setup was pretty simple. I tweaked the cam­era set­tings using the cam­era man­u­fac­turer­’s set­ting soft­ware, then ran the HomeCamera.com client.

The Cli­ent allows you to set up and share your cam­er­as. Again, very easy.

Since HomeCamera.com is in beta, their ser­vice / per­form­ance may fluc­tu­ate — though I’ve nev­er had any issues.

As well, HomeCamera.com ser­vice is free dur­ing this beta peri­od. Accord­ing to the site, there will be a free option, but also a paid one too:

We expect to exit beta and go com­mer­cial in early 2010. At that time, we will offer two ser­vice plans: FREE (which is pretty much the ser­vice you see now, with a few lim­it­a­tions on num­ber of online cam­er­as and serv­er stor­age) and the full ser­vice (with video stream­ing) at US$ 29.95 YEARLY. Yes, that’s $29.95 per year — we want to keep the price low enough for reg­u­lar people to eas­ily afford the ser­vice. At this price, it’s cheap­er than a cup of cof­fee a month… 

So, I now have a video-based home mon­it­or­ing sys­tem. Basic­ally free, as I had all the parts anyway.

There are oth­er online mon­it­or­ing solu­tions out there, but this one just seemed to be the simplest for me…got any ideas how I can improve this setup? Let me know!