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This question feels lousy to ask but... I am just having the hardest time finding software that can let me share what my USB webcam sees with my co-workers on a LAN.

Cheese is popular but it seems to require me to manually take and post a picture. I want them to see whatever it's pointed at whenever they look, even if I am home sick that day.

Running Ubuntu 14.04 and Gnome desktop

DavidF
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  • Do you want to stream from your webcam? – user68186 Jan 26 '15 at 15:34
  • See https://gist.github.com/endolith/2052778 and http://xmodulo.com/live-stream-video-webcam-linux.html – user68186 Jan 26 '15 at 15:42
  • @user68186 I don't think full-motion streaming is essential but the current still image when a user requests one is good. – DavidF Jan 26 '15 at 16:01
  • the VLC solution looks promising, I am going to try that now – DavidF Jan 26 '15 at 16:02
  • The software motion is very flexible. I think one can configure it to take snap shots at fixed intervals and send it to some server. However, I have not used motion in a while, and so I am not inclined to write a full answer.Also see http://askubuntu.com/questions/98035/streaming-a-webcam-video-to-the-web-page-in-ubuntu – user68186 Jan 26 '15 at 16:07
  • I wrote a related answer here – Pablo Bianchi Jan 27 '22 at 19:43

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Another option is zoneminder. You will need to add the zoneminder repository:

apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties
add-apt-repository ppa:iconnor/zoneminder
apt-get update

You will also need apache2 ubuntu-restricted-extras libav-tools x264:

sudo apt-get install apache2 ubuntu-restricted-extras libav-tools x264

Click here for more instructions on how to set up mysql and php.

Then,

Follow the instructions here and be patient with the setup. You will probably have to mess around with the individual camera settings before it will work.

You can set up passwords for security so that not just anybody can see the camera. They will have access to the server through any web browser.

The zoneminder server will auto start when you start ubuntu and it runs in the background.

After you get it set up, you can take note of the URL (using the static ip of your computer) for the camera feed to give to users to access the camera if you like or you can inspect the html to get the feed URL to set up a minimal page of your own on your apache server accessible on the local network.

www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Documentation

www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Ubuntu_Server_14.04_64-bit_with_Zoneminder_1.28.0_the_easy_way

www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-linux-apache-mysql-php-lamp-stack-on-ubuntu

mchid
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