Yawcam Webcam Security Software

There are a lot of different programs around these days which claim to be able to turn your webcam or other video source into a cutting edge PC based security system on the cheap.

Most are terrible.

If its not a time limited trial, then its severely buggy, or just plain useless. Motion detection is one of the big issues here - on some of the software its very poorly coded, so will constantly give you false positives, from sunlight glare etc.

Thankfully I've finally found a totally freeware solution which although still in Beta, seems to work really well.

Yawcam stands for "Yet Another Webcam software" apparently, though they seem to have done a better job with this than any of the others I've tried over the years (probably around 20 or so).

With Yawcam you can start very simply, for example you might want it to take a snapshot every 37 seconds and save it to your harddrive. Or maybe you want to automatically upload an image to your FTP server every 5 seconds. Or you might like to enable motion detection, and have it simultaneously save images to your harddrive, upload them to your FTP server, email you to alert you to the intruder, and play an audio clip of yourself explaining to the burglar that they are fucked. :)

You can download Yawcam from their website.

You'll also want to check out their forum