Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part III: Home Security

Figure 12-1 shows the conceptual architecture of this project. You visit a

web page, and relay commands to your computer by clicking on links. Your

computer controls multiple cameras, and determines which camera is cur-

rently active. The computer feeds the live video across the Internet to the

your video player, which is embedded in a web page.

Figure 12-1. This project’s conceptual

design is basically the same one used by

any closed-circuit camera system.

Project Overview

This project has five phases, which

correspond to the layers in our con-

ceptual design:

• Video Cameras

• Video Capture

• Video Transfer

• Video Playback

• Playback Control

Each of these components is modu-

lar, so you can complete them in a

different order if you’re waiting for

a part to arrive or if you’re particu-

larly interested in a certain aspect of

the project. You can even pick and

choose the components you want to

use. If you only want a single camera

system, you can completely skip the

Playback Control phase. If you want

to monitor video on a computer that

is connected directly to the video

capture mechanism, you can skip

the Video Transfer phase.

Shortcut: Buy a video camera with a built-in server that connects to your home’s

local area network, and watch it from anywhere. The “Video Cameras” phase

describes these cameras in more ...