Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Web Cam Time Lapse

I've done a couple time lapse videos recently, and I think I'm becoming a bit of a time lapse fan. This latest app combines time lapse photography with the skiing web cams that I watch every day (via my Vista gadget!)

The app watches a list of web cams which you provide and saves a copy of the image at intervals which you specify. My plan is to let a bunch of these run for the next few months and then stitch them together into some type of movie. Maybe none of them will turn out well, but it was an interesting little application to write nonetheless.

The program writes out a file called usersettings.xml and that contains all the information that you provided when you set up the web cams via the Add button. If you need to edit any of the information you provided, you'll have to close the program, edit the xml, and then restart. New threads are spawned to download all the images. There are a lot of potential holes in the program, but it has been running fine on my machine for a few days.

If you've been looking for something similar, feel free to check it out. The source code and binaries are posted on Codeplex at http://www.codeplex.com/webcamtimelapse.