Welcome to my blog

Hello and welcome to my blog. I enjoy messing around creating websites, YouTube videos, blogs and other stuff. I write this blog in my spare time to share my enthusiasm for technology, gadgets and the internet.

18/12/2010

How to make a timelapse using a webcam

The type of webcam used in this tutorial is not a USB one. It's an IP camera or the kind of webcam you might use to look at a tourist destination or anywhere of interest.

First you need to get some images to work with. IP cameras are good because you don't need a computer running to save images or video from them. Most IP cameras have a function that involves saving pictures on a timed interval. It dosen't matter where you save the pictures, on an SD card or on an FTP server are the usual choices. You need to choose how often you want the camera to take a picture. It depends on what you want to see in the timelapse. If you want to see the clouds flowing about in the sky, I would reccomend an interval of 30 seconds. If you want something slower, like a plant growing, you might only take one a day. This is a setting you must set in the IP camera configuration page and varies by model, so I can't give exact instructions.

If you saved the pictures on an FTP server, login to it on your computer and download all the images. If you used an SD card, just copy the pictures over. Put them in a folder on your Desktop for easy access. Then you need to download a program called MakeAVI. After you have downloaded it and uncompressed it, open it up and select your images. Then choose a frame rate. If you took one photo per minute, a frame rate of 15FPS (Frames Per Second) would show 15 minutes of video in a second. After choosing a suitable frame rate, click begin, choose a filname and select a format on the next screen. There will be a list of formats but if you want one that gives good quaity without taking up too much space, choose "XviD MPEG-4 Codec." If you don't have that, you can download it here.

After it has completed, you will have the timelapse wherever you saved it and you can now do whatever you want with it. Put it on Facebook, upload it to YouTube etc.

Hint: Can't find it? It's probably in the same folder as the pictures. You should look before you click save!

20/08/2010

How to disable IR lights

It seems that the only way to disable the IR lights on this webcam from ebay without cutting the wires is to do this.



Yes. Stick blue tack all over them, and it has to be a pretty thick layer to block all of the light.

06/08/2010

The many different clones of one IP camera

If you want to buy an IP camera, or have already bought one, and it is a cheap pan/tilt chinese made item, you should probably read this.

After a while of owning any gadget, one usually gets bored with it and wonders if there is a way to make it better. Usually, firmware updates are that way. They fix bugs and add more features for you to play with. Perfect. But you need to be careful with them. There are many different companies that sell very similar IP cameras that may have slightly different components. And if you install one companies firmware onto another companies camera, what you will get is a bricked IP camera. A "bricked" IP camera is one that is as useless as a brick at doing what is supposed to, it may be good as a paper weight however. So if you have one of these, make sure you get the firmware from the company it is actually made by, and not from a company that makes similar looking ones.

Here is an example:
 The camera above is made by a company called "EasyN"
And the one below is made by a company called "Foscam"
See how they look exactly the same? Except the top one has the LED and light sensor in different places.

01/06/2010

Understanding pixels, megapixels and video resolutions

Megapixels can be quite confusing. They are generally used in cameras to tell you how good the picture will be. One megapixel is one million pixels. A pixels is a tiny dot. If you look at a screen very closely you can just about see the pixels.

An example of where you might find megapixels is on a digital camera box. At the moment, a good amount of pixels for a digital camera is probably around 10 megapixels.

In films and TV, standard definition is 720×480 pixels which can be multiplied to give 345600 pixels. This means the total resolution of one frame of video at standard definition is 0.3456 megapixels. In high definition video, there are two different types - full HD/1080p HD and 720p HD/half HD. 720p HD is 1280×720 pixels which gives 921,600 pixels when multiplied. That is nearly one megapixel. Full HD is 1920×1080 which gives 2,073,600 pixels which is about 2 megapixels for each frame. This shows how much better picture quality you can expect from HD compared to SD but HD also takes up far more storage space.

05/02/2010

How to download YouTube videos to a PSP

1.Find the video you want on Youtube and copy the link for it from the address bar
2.Go to www.keepvid.com and put the link in the box and on the dropdown menu choose YouTube

09/01/2010

Hama Star 75 Tripod

This tripod from amazon is, In my opinion, quite good. It weighs 620g and comes in a carry bag. Its height when fully extended is 125cm and its height when collapsed is 42.5cm according to the manufacturer. It uses clips to secure the legs when extended, unlike the old one I had before this. It also has a useful spirit level for the tilt.

06/01/2010

My favorite watermarker- Exif watermarker

My favorite watermarker- Exif watermarker is my chosen number one watermarker because it is simple and easy to use and offers resizing as well as watermarking. The program is free but you can buy a license key to remove the reminder- yes reminder, not plural. It only shows one single reminder when the program starts up. It works quickly and produces high quality files (Provided you set the quality quite high). I actually use it for the pictures in this blog, so take a look at them.