Foscam FI8918W cellar cam Demo for any web browser
Cellar cam – live demo for any browser
This is a cut down demo which may work with browsers other than FireFox and Chrome. If you use either of those I recommend that you switch to Foscam FI8918W live demo. Recently due to abuse of this cam I have had to take steps to conceal its url and passwords. The way I have implemented this means I have had to reduce the refresh rate and as a consequence this demo will be very sluggish
Normally the cellar is unlit although a limited amount of sunlight comes through the small window behind the webcam.
IR views are black and white.
When daylight is available or the cellar lighting is on there will be a colour picture.
Any colour may be rather washed out if the light level is too low to automatically turn off the IR LEDs.
This page displays snapshots from the camera and requires javascript to refresh the image at around a frame a second. Snapshots taken while the camera is in motion will be blurred and that blurring will persist until there is a refresh from when the camera has stopped. This effect is not nearly so noticeable when using the videostream.
As the video snapshots use a considerable portion of my home upstream bandwidth I have to limit visitor access time and the only way I can do that is by imbedding the camera access into my own webpage.
If you want more than one test that’s OK but I’m well aware it is easy enough to hack into the camera for unlimited access time or indeed to screw up the settings – I’ll just ask you nicely not to do that or I’ll have to block access to it entirely which would be a shame.
In the meantime abuses have forced me to limit upstream bandwidth for this camera.
Welcome to Hell. Here’s your copy of Windows Vista
I have written to you previously and have enjoyed your site. It has been very helpful in the setting up my foscam. In fact I was able to create my own web cam page using your helpful pages as a template. I lack the php page, which I think is a very good idea. How did you protect your foscam with a php page? I would like to do the same thing and not have the foscam directly on the web. I see in your code, you are sending foscam commands to a php page, but how does that result get returned to the page the public sees? Would you show an example of that php page, or partial page so I may see what you are doing? It would be a big help! Many thanks! Dave M
What I was doing was using a redirect to the camera in the php page which prevented view source showing the camera url.
Unfortunately I found that this was not effective as a right click on the camera image and view image showed the real camera url so I no longer do that and just use the real camera url as you will see if you look at the iframe source.
Make sure that you don’t use the administrator user and password or you’ll forever be having to set the camera up again – idiots seem to enjoy turning off the LEDs or parking the camera at the limits of its travel where there is nothing other than the wall to see so access to setup commands would be an irresistible temptation I’m sure.
I have found that the only real protection of my bandwidth from abuse is to set some rather draconian QoS rules in my router once the data transfer has exceeded 15MB. Even that didn’t prevent at least a couple of users from disconnecting and reconnecting to enable constant monitoring of my rather boring cellar – I’m not sure quite what they expected to see. As the IPs were fixed I simply set them to a class that restricts the data rate to 10kbps. I suppose they could use TOR next but that hasn’t happened so far. I use Tomato firmware in my router which makes this easy but the supported hardware is limited so you may need to look to DD-WRT, Open-WRT, or something else if your router QoS support is too simplistic to do that sort of thing.
I will hopefully be moving to BT Infinity soon – a VSDL FTTC product which will give me 20Mbps upstream and with that the drain of a webcab simply won’t matter although I’ll still leave some restriction in place.
Great live cam. Yes, a cellar is a cellar but good to see how well it works. I don’t know if you rigged the spider but seems you have a big juicy one living on your camera!!
If there is a spider he Is a genuine wildlife exhibit and not a pet. There are certainly some down there. My outside entry cam which isn’t on the public web gets lots of them.
I got one of these – I don’t intend to mount it so I can just move it wherever I like. It is a bit bandwidth hungry if you are accessing it from outside the local network and also not incredibly secure. Makes me think buying a larger pixel sized camera might actually be bad considering bandwidth. Easy to DOS attack also, even accidentally. I decided to not open ports to it and I use my openvpn server inside the lan to access the camera remotly. UDP openvpn server is fast, secure and it solves the problem of lots of random people trying to hit the camera with random port checks. I think the quality for the price is great. I like the alarms also. I run XP in a VM inside ubuntu and I share a drive directly to the XP VM for big storage. Works well. Keeps me from having to run a dedicate XP machine just for the IE and Active-X.