webcamXP 5 5.3.4.348

3.4 out of 5 stars 3.4 (109 votes)

(October 26, 2009)

Windows 2000/2003/Me/Vista/XP / Freeware / 4,637 downloads

webcamXP is a powerful webcam utility that allows you to share your webcam with everyone without having to set a web server on your computer. The web server is integrated to the software and needs only a few configuration parameters such as server port and local directory.

This is a brand new project (aka wLite) that will replace webcamXP 2008. The interface is much simpler to use for nearly the same features. It targets Vista OS but works fine on XP and 2003 Server and doesn't require administrator rights. A service version should be available shortly and the CPU requirements should not be as high as webcamXP 2007/2008 and can be installed on older computers. It also includes the IP Camera DirectShow filter and webcamXP Mobile for PocketPC.

Note: This program is free for private use. The Private and Pro versions are available for a fee.

Reviews

Discussions

Reviews of webcamXP 5

  1. 1 out of 5 stars
    ObscureUserName

    Reviewing 5.3.4.252 (Aug 19, 2009)

    Overall this software is not of acceptable quality to pay for. I am currently utilizing the 60 day trial, version 5.3.4.164.

    Firstly, startup takes a very long time on a P4 2.4GHZ Northwood, 512MB ram. Not sure what kind of discovery it is doing but I get the splash screen with status updates and then no interface an 100% CPU usage for several minutes before the UI is visible.

    All around, the User Interface is quite contorted. You have to right click to do just about everything. If you unplug a camera and plug it in again - even to the exact same port - your settings are lost. Every time I change resolution for my QuickCam for Notebooks, the face-tracking setting is reset and I have to turn it back off.

    Motion detection takes a lot of CPU, requiring me to drop my video resolution down to sub 320x240. There is no pre-buffering of the video so the lag between detection and start of recording is enough that you can quite literally never see what made the motion detection alert fire.

    Even with Windows Media Encoder installed none of the WMV compression profiles work. There is no error message given when recording starts and all other notifications indicate that it has successfully recorded a video when it simply has not. The same applies to almost all other compression options in the drop down. There is no indication whether the selection even has properties as the properties button either pulls up another dialog or does nothing at all leaving the user to wonder if they should be waiting or whether there simply is no dialog.

    The web interface is hokey in that it uses javascript to just request an IMG url over and over and over. Ideally this should be streamed to a flash object (their flash object does the same thing as the javascript) or similar, not sending a request 3 times a second.

    The motion detection is a simple "start when noticed and record X seconds afterwards" rather than recording while motion is present. It still serves its purpose but you wind up with the video of interest segmented into several different files.

    When the motion detection does go off and start recording, the web interface does not update. I'm not sure whether this is due to the 100% cpu usage or whether, when recording a video, the software blocks all other communication to the web cam. This is unacceptable for my purposes as monitoring the cams in real time is mission critical.

    All around this software was advertised to be much more than it is. From my experience it is a contorted mess of a user interface and extremely low performance software. I would do not recommend this software, especially for anything to do with security in mission critical environments.

  2. 5 out of 5 stars
    rhinohide

    Reviewing 5.3.4.164 (Jul 1, 2009)

    I've been running it continuously on Win7 32bit for a few days and it is working well so far. Using a Logitech webcam. Very easy to setup and not too hard to find everything except for the first time you have to choose your camera and assign it to a video source numbered tile. Even that only took me a minute to figure out. I installed the free version which disables some features.
    It generates a nice, simple web interface for the end user and allows the user to switch video compression methods as well as control panning and zooming. If you choose the Flash format it cuts the network bandwidth used quite a bit and still looks just as good as the other formats.

  3. 3 out of 5 stars
    ravemanson

    Reviewing 5.3.4.156 (Jun 15, 2009)

    - Windows SEVEN please!
    - Many parts of the interface is very un-intuitive and takes luck figuring out.

  4. 1 out of 5 stars
    bigspud

    Reviewing 5.3.4.075 (Apr 24, 2009)

    program locks on startup, just crap, dont waste your time.

  5. 3 out of 5 stars
    hunterb

    Reviewing 5.3.2.450 (Feb 2, 2009)

    Free version puts a banner in the image. Even Pro Trial still has this. I can not configure my DirectShow USB camera source size with this - greyed out. General features look good.

Write a Review View All Reviews

Discuss webcamXP 5

Post a Discussion