Intranet video-streaming

Question

What's a good option for home-video-streaming?

For example, somebody may use a laptop webcam to stream their baby's crib allowing them to monitor it from the main home PC. In this case, I wouldn't want to do it across the wire with Skype, but instead keep it on my local network. What options exist to make this easy to achieve?

Answer 1

VLC actually works very well in this case.

In VLC you can set it up to take your Webcam video, or any DirectShow compatible device, and encode it and multicast it on your entire LAN. You can then tune into the feed from any computer throughout the house. You can even set it up to advertise the stream via SAP. With that setup you could have multiple streams on the network, but you can easily access them without having to configure every time, using the SAP advertisements.

There is a pretty good guide on how to set it up on the VLC wiki.

Answer 2

I use Yawcam. It's seriously awesome for something like this.

I use it to watch my dog at home from work.

Answer 3

I'm using Motion, a package in the Ubuntu repositories. It allows streaming video and can also capture movement, and post to a website.

It is very flexible (I'm using it to monitor my dogs from work).

I worked with my bargain basement $10 webcams - which appear to be limited only by hardware, the software will run as many as you can connect.

Answer 4

Netcam Studio is free, easy to set up and allows you to run it as a service, in case you need automatically starting 24/7 streaming.