Capture stills from remote URL

[DirkyBoy]

Greetings fellow cammers,

I run 2 webcams as a security measure in my home. I also have a home
automation software that can send an Email with an attachment under
certain circumstances - but it is running on a different mahcine than
the cameras.

What I would like to find is a peice of software where the Home
Automation system can execute it as a shelled procedure, I can give the
"image capture software" a URL (to an image file off my webcam ... say
http://my.image.com/image1.jpg) ) and have it save that image to the
local drive and then TERMINATE the pogram.

Does such a thing exist? It seems very easy (in my mind) to create {{{
attach to remote URL, download image, save to predefined filename
locally, exit program }}} but alas I have not been a programmer for many
years now.

Is there anyone keen enough to be able to recommend such a simplistic,
yet effective innovative peice of software?

Thanks.

-Dirk

[Mr Big]

I don't know if this helps, but try:
www.pysoft.com/ActiveWebCamMainpage.htm

Joe


"DirkyBoy" > wrote in message
. 4.24...
> Greetings fellow cammers,
>
> I run 2 webcams as a security measure in my home. I also have a home
> automation software that can send an Email with an attachment under
> certain circumstances - but it is running on a different mahcine than
> the cameras.
>
> What I would like to find is a peice of software where the Home
> Automation system can execute it as a shelled procedure, I can give the
> "image capture software" a URL (to an image file off my webcam ... say
> http://my.image.com/image1.jpg) ) and have it save that image to the
> local drive and then TERMINATE the pogram.
>
> Does such a thing exist? It seems very easy (in my mind) to create {{{
> attach to remote URL, download image, save to predefined filename
> locally, exit program }}} but alas I have not been a programmer for many
> years now.
>
> Is there anyone keen enough to be able to recommend such a simplistic,
> yet effective innovative peice of software?
>
> Thanks.
>
> -Dirk

[Andrew Burgess]

DirkyBoy > writes:

>What I would like to find is a peice of software where the Home
>Automation system can execute it as a shelled procedure, I can give the
>"image capture software" a URL (to an image file off my webcam ... say
>http://my.image.com/image1.jpg) ) and have it save that image to the
>local drive and then TERMINATE the pogram.

wget will download any url or entire website. Don't know if it runs
on whatever OS you are using.

[Chuck Y]

FILE=`mktemp -t MyImage`
wget -o $FILE http://foo.example.com/path/to/image.jpg

# need the write suffix for mutt to label it right per MIME type.
mv $FILE $FILE.jpg

/usr/local/bin/mutt -a $FILE.jpg -s "here's the image"


(mutt or pine or about 14 million other command line MUAs will
do it).

wget is GPL'd, curl is BSD licensed. You have a choice. YOu have
several choices. It's unix, there are many ways to do it will and
reliably and securely and quickly and cheaply.

Andrew Burgess wrote:
> DirkyBoy > writes:
>
>
>>What I would like to find is a peice of software where the Home
>>Automation system can execute it as a shelled procedure, I can give the
>>"image capture software" a URL (to an image file off my webcam ... say
>>http://my.image.com/image1.jpg) ) and have it save that image to the
>>local drive and then TERMINATE the pogram.
>
>
> wget will download any url or entire website. Don't know if it runs
> on whatever OS you are using.
>

[Xenna]

Chuck Y wrote:

> wget is GPL'd, curl is BSD licensed. You have a choice. YOu have
> several choices. It's unix, there are many ways to do it will and
> reliably and securely and quickly and cheaply.

Yeah, but Unix is the keyword here. Doing things like this under Windows
is usually more of a headache. There are windows versions of curl, wget
or even lynx (which will do the job nicely as well) but then you have to
set up the scheduling and scripting...

If you muck around with MSIE and active desktop you may be able to have
it do automatic downloads of pictures but I don't know if you can make
it store different copies.

X.

[Chuck Y]

Xenna wrote:
> Chuck Y wrote:
>
>> wget is GPL'd, curl is BSD licensed. You have a choice. YOu have
>> several choices. It's unix, there are many ways to do it will and
>> reliably and securely and quickly and cheaply.
>
>
> Yeah, but Unix is the keyword here. Doing things like this under Windows
> is usually more of a headache. There are windows versions of curl, wget
> or even lynx (which will do the job nicely as well) but then you have to
> set up the scheduling and scripting...
>
> If you muck around with MSIE and active desktop you may be able to have
> it do automatic downloads of pictures but I don't know if you can make
> it store different copies.

They'll work under that other OS under Cygwin, I suppose. Or you can
buy something - that's what you're supposed to do with Windows.

For the cost of 2 floppies, you can upgrade to FreeBSD in about 30
minutes (less time than you spend dealing with viruses each week).
To get wget, you just type:
cd /usr/ports/net/wget; make install clean

To get a free Excel work-alike:
cd /usr/ports/math/gnumeric; make install clean


<SOAP BOX>
free, secure, powerful, no weekly viruses, tremendous functionality.
If you spend the amount of time you spend fighting windows and upgrading
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