# The Poor Man Online Webcam Server using FreeBSD ;)



## Spartrekus (May 12, 2018)

Title: The Poor Man Online Webcam Server using FreeBSD 
Goal: How to run a Webcam using apache2 http on Freebsd?
Installation time: 15 min
Difficulty: Low


!= What to do first?
Buy a raspberry, install FreeBSD
https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm/Raspberry Pi
Bring into crontab a way to make it reachable from the net.
Here a cool DynDNS alternative: https://freedns.afraid.org/
wget will make sure that the url of your webcam is available.

!= Get the scripts for the webcam
Recommended webcam here would be a tpilink. 
A tpilink is cheap and of excellent quality. It runs Linux, and tplink gives you access to your webcam 
Tpilink is really Free Mind and they do not lock you like Android, MS,...
https://github.com/spartrekus/raspberry-webcam-webstreamer
It may of course work with any other webcam with different settings.

!= Webcam on Apache
(1) Install apache2 on FreeBSD (or alternatively Linux if you haven't other choice). (2) Install "screen". (3) Run the bash within screen, and make sure to check permissions for wget to operate. (3) On any browser, you can see the page.html which will be refreshed each 5 seconds.

Your location of web server is /var/www/html/...

!= Webpage
The html file page.html will be refreshed every 5 seconds.

Done in 15 minutes.


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## Crivens (May 12, 2018)

I vote for you formatting it a bit more and then it goes to the howto section.


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## Spartrekus (May 12, 2018)

I should do it indeed.
I used unimark format but forums use bbcode.
https://github.com/spartrekus/mrk2html

I am not so sure if my post is sufficiently detailed to fit into howto.


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## Lamia (May 12, 2018)

Thanks Spartrekus for the outline.
If you can provide the granular details, that would be appreciated. 

Webcam access is one of the features I am exploring here - https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/access-usd-drive-on-another-pc-as-dev-cuau0.65779/

I know that my choice package has its way of doing it though. Your idea needs to be evaluated, since I am looking for a custom solution.


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## Lamia (May 12, 2018)

Lamia said:


> Thanks Spartrekus for the outline.
> If you can provide the granular details, that would be appreciated.
> 
> Webcam access is one of the features I am exploring here - https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/access-usd-drive-on-another-pc-as-dev-cuau0.65779/
> ...



Your git URL says it all. You need not rewrite it unless you have some new thoughts to add.


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## kpedersen (May 12, 2018)

I developed this a while ago for a local museum so people could log into model tanks and stream data from the cameras.
https://github.com/osen/tstream
You might find it useful.

It uses opencv to get data from the webcam but then uses nothing more than normal websockets to host and stream on a web page. It uses websockets so that a stream connection can be set up and can get a good framerate over a decent connection.

Basically no dependencies other than opencv and it compiles to a single executable so you don't need to run a separate web server etc..


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