Help me catch a thief/s.

[denbot]

The crime/s: Our kitties are spoiled rotten, and turn up their noses at the food we present to them with out rhyme or reason. On a regular basis other cats, possums, and we believe raccoons enter through the kitty door and clean out all the food/water/ in their bowls, and occasionally stuff on the lower shelfs of our pantries.

We've talked about buying and setting up a web-cam to see what prowls our house while we sleep. I just realized that this laptop has a built in camera. It does not seem to have a auto picture function. What is a free or cheap utility that will allow me to take pictures using a built in laptop camera?

I promise to post pictures of what ever is going slurp in the dark, while casa denbot slumbers.

[Skittles]

1. FYI denbot

I can kick cat, possum and raccoon ass. I'd do it for you for free my sweet; yes INDEED

[denbot]

2. That you do Skittles, but how to I take stop motion pictures of their well deserved Ass Kicking?

PS are you comfortable kicking ass on a Raccoon?

[csziggy]

3. Look for a video surveillance program with motion sensing

I used to use one for monitoring the farm, with my HandyCam. It may have been SecureCam ,but I am not sure since it has been years. If it was Secure Cam, that has been replaced by MJPEG Surveillance 2.0 (http://www.12oclocker.com/). What is cool about it is that you can set one section of the area being monitored and if anything changes in that section, it will begin taking images or video. So you could have it 'watch' the pet door or the food bowls.

Another similar program is YawCam (http://www.yawcam.com/). According to a old review of it and SecureCam, YawCam is better: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/two-motion-sensor-webcam-softwares-to-snap-those-intruders/

These will NOT work in the dark - you probably will have to leave lights on so the camera has enough light to pick up an image for the software to analyze.

[r54w32]

4. proggies

Hey thanks.I was lookin for one of those motion capture doo dads... :hi:

[csziggy]

5. When they work, they are great

The one I used worked great. One of the files I still have saved is about ten minutes long but it shows video from all day with horses, birds and wildlife coming by and with shadows moving - they can be that sensitive to get the change of light! I kept a camera set up in the office window shooting down our hill and picked one day that was characteristic but that had a good amount of action. Not exactly scintillating video, but a nice composite of what life is like here.

But when we got ready to build our house, the program I had used would not work - I think at that point it had not been upgraded to Win XP or something. I used something different that just took XX frames at XX intervals. It does show the progress of the house building, but it is not anywhere near as interesting as having the video segments the other program had. I'm hoping to try out one of the programs I posted to see if I can get the same type of video I had before. With the deer, foxes, birds and coyotes coming by, it should be interesting if I can get the program to work!