Windows 7 Annoyances

The Trouble with Webcams

Historically, buying a webcam has been an exercise in compromise. Webcams don’t have the universal appeal of, say, printers, and as such, don’t enjoy an abundance of high-quality choices nor the comfort of well-established industry standards.

For instance, most webcams are cheap and offer horrendous video quality. As a result, many are quickly discontinued, making it extremely difficult to find up-to-date drivers for older models. (A webcam designed for Windows XP isn’t likely to work in Windows Vista or 7, and don’t even get me started on the search for 64-bit drivers.)

If you’re lucky enough to find a webcam that works with Windows 7/Vista, it probably won’t do everything you need it to. Of course, the most hyped feature—resolution—is the least important: a 5-megapixel webcam isn’t necessarily any better than a 1.3-megapixel model. (How often will you be taking still photos with an eyeball-cam tethered to your laptop?) But the sexier features, like motorized face tracking (enabling video chat without having to sit perfectly still), autofocus, network streaming (for surveillance, baby monitoring, and web publishing), and high frame rate (for smooth, blur-free video) are often mutually exclusive, making compromise inevitable.

If you’d rather do without the compromise, you’ll have to narrow the field a bit. Highest priority is UVC (USB Video device Class) compliance: you can plug a UVC webcam into any Windows 7 machine, and it’ll work without any special drivers. A UVC webcam won’t pose any problem for x64 Windows, nor the next few successors to Windows 7 (not to mention XP, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.).

Warning

You may also run across IIDC (Instrumentation & Industrial Digital Camera), which is an earlier counterpart of UVC, but exclusively for Firewire (IEEE 1394) connections. For instance, the Apple iSight is a IIDC camera, and is automatically recognized in Windows 7 as a “1394 Desktop Video Camera.” Alas, Windows 7 has no universal driver for the microphone in IIDC cameras, so it’s probably best to avoid IIDC unless you already own one and use a separate audio source.

Also important is the brand name. If you don’t want to buy yet another disposable webcam you’ll have to replace in six months, avoid the cheap, no-name webcams and stick with Logitech, Creative Labs, or even Microsoft (gasp) to ensure driver availability in the years to come.

Note

Another way to avoid the “driver trap” is to use an IP camera, one that connects directly to your network (either wirelessly or with a Cat-5 cable). No USB connection means no USB driver is needed. And since most IP cameras with special features like pan-tilt-zoom controls are web-based, all you need is a browser to control it. (For this reason, avoid IP cameras that require proprietary software.) See Use an IP Webcam for Videoconferencing for more on network cameras.

Finally, read online reviews—not surprisingly, they’re plentiful at YouTube—to see how well a particular model actually renders an image. Look for a webcam that performs well in low light and handles motion without blurring. A widescreen aspect ratio (16×9) is a plus, as is a good mounting system (for attaching to laptop and desktop screens, resting on a desktop, or perching on a tripod) and a built-in microphone that reproduces voice clearly.

Once you’ve got a webcam that works, check out the following sections for ways to use it in Windows 7.

Turn a USB Webcam into an IP Webcam

An IP camera can transmit a video stream over a network connection, allowing you watch video from a remote location and even embed the video in a web page. These are typically standalone devices that either plug into your router or connect wirelessly over WiFi, but you can turn the ordinary USB webcam you already own into an IP camera with a spare laptop and the right software.

webcamXP (which, despite the name, works just fine on Windows 7) is available free for personal use from http://www.webcamxp.com/. Once you install and start it up, right-click the video box and select your camera from the list of video sources. Then, from any other computer on your network, type the first PC’s IP address in the address field followed by :8080 (e.g., http://192.168.1.107:8080/) to view the live video feed right in the browser.

Now, the “video” shown on the webcamXP web page is merely a constantly updating still image, which works on any browser and any platform—it’ll even give you live video on an iPhone via Safari. But if you need a true Windows Media stream, fire up the webcamXP [Windows Media] link in the Start menu instead. Then go to mms://192.168.1.107:9001, and Windows Media Player will open and play your stream.

Note

Don’t want to tether your camera to a laptop? You can turn any composite video source into a wireless IP webcam by connecting it to a “Wireless IP Video Transmitter,” a small box with a WiFi antenna. But if you don’t already have a camera, you can get an all-in-one wireless webcam for about the same amount of money, and do away with the clutter and fuss of all those wires.

Use an IP Webcam for Videoconferencing

You can turn a common USB webcam into an IP camera (as described in the previous section), so why not the other way around? To use a network camera with programs like Windows Media Encoder, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Live, and Skype, you have several options.

For one, there’s Link2Cam (free from http://sourceforge.net/projects/link2cam/), which is a DirectShow filter that effectively tricks Windows into thinking your remote camera is just another video source. Link2Cam works with ASF video streams.

If the free software doesn’t cut it, there are commercial alternatives. The IP Camera DirectShow Filter from http://www.webcamxp.com/ supports MPEG, H264, MJPEG, and JPEG streams, and is discussed in the previous section. Also available is Willing Webcam, which also supports motion detection, live video streaming, and time-lapse photography.

Want to record video from a remote camera? Try Debut Video Capture Software, which is free at http://www.nchsoftware.com/capture/.