Webcams

[Don Corleone]

Well, dont tell Mrs. Corleone, but I got the word in my central marketing meeting today that I have a couple of road trips to make in the next month or two, including a two week stint to China & Singapore.

So, I was thinking I could buy a pair of webcams and then, I could.....

Okay, I know nothing about how to do this. If I have a high bandwidth connection at home & on my laptop (at the hotel in China, say), what else will I need? If anybody has any experience with this sort of thing, please let me know. Thank you.

[BDC]

MSN Messenger lets you use them easily and without too much hassle. You could use mics too. Pretty useful if you both have hotmail accounts already.

[doc_bean]

14y old girls seem to be able to hook 'em up and cause themselves a lot of damage, so I'm pretty sure it's not that hard.

[Craterus]

14y old girls seem to be able to hook 'em up and cause themselves a lot of damage,

That's my sister...

[doc_bean]

I hope she didn't do what the girl I was referring to did...

[Alexanderofmacedon]

That's my sister...

Link?











I'm JK

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

That's my sister...

What, all of them?

Fat chicks+webcams=no.

[Lord Godfrey]

Skype has good and free service for webcams - my whole family is on it and we use it for individual and conference calls every week.

http://www.skype.com/

[Blodrast]

Damn !
DC, you let me down - I actually had really high hopes for this thread !
I thought you'd decided to make an extra buck by launching your own pr-erm, adult entertainment website...

And it turns out that you just wanna figure out how to make the setup work...blech.

[Blodrast]

ok, for a serious answer this time - well, I'm not up to date with this, but I did do this kind of thing a while ago (no, not the adult entertainment thingie - I'd be rich now...and I'm not).

There are at least two ways you can approach this:
- I imagine most chat clients support webcam these days; I did this with yahoo 5+ years ago, and it worked smoothly - didn't have to do anything in particular after installing the webcam.
I'm sure most/all major clients support it.
You might wanna check out Skype, although I've heard some people complaining about it, but not too sure whether it was something serious or not.

- there are also websites which allow you to broadcast your webcam. You give the URL (and presumably a password) to the person you want to allow to connect to your webcam, and they can see you all the time.

Now it will be up to you how you want to do this - the chat option seems more reasonable in your situation - especially since you can use a mike and headphones and you'll be hearing and seeing each other at the same time - no typing required.

Good luck.

[Xiahou]

Webcams are a snap to setup. For some you just plug them into the USB port and you're done if the drivers are already builtin. However, most tell you to install software before you plug it in- to play it safe just follow their advice. Either way its pretty simple.

For videoconferencing software, just about every IM program has some sort of video portion. But, for a dedicated program you might want to look at SightSpeed. It's free for the basic plan (covers unlimited 1-1 videoconferencing) and for a yearly fee you can do multi-party conferences.