Streaming video from a point-and-shoot camera that doesn't support it

Question

I have a Canon IXUS 120is (PowerShot SD940) - a nice digital camera that's a couple of years old. It does record fairly decent video, but, alas, can't function as a webcam - and I need to stream video over the Web. I've installed CHDK on it, and while it's quite flexible, doesn't seem to provide a solution to my problem.

I suppose that the video footage is written to the SD card in real time - is there a hack that allows me to monitor the file as it is written, and broadcast its contents over the Internet? Perhaps connecting its the camera's slot to my laptop's card reader via SDIO?

I'm running Windows, but I'm roughly familiar with Linux; another question has suggested a file-to-/dev/video driver - do such tools exist?

Answer 1

On Linux, I've had luck with gphoto2 and a Canon EOS Rebel XS. I had to fiddle with the timing to get it to work properly, but this works:

1. Plug the camera in and turn it on.

2. While the camera is warming up, execute the following:

   $ gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download --interval 1
   

(or however frequently you want to snap pictures.) It's not quite realtime, but it might get you headed in the right direction. A new image is saved to the current directory every time the camera takes a picture, and it will happily continue to snap away as long as you don't switch the camera off.