IpstreamWebCam is a free software that lets you stream webcam over the local network or over the internet. With this software, you can turn your normal webcam to an IP camera. You can access the video feed from any computer in the same network, or over the internet using just an internet browser. You can also restrict the access with a username and a password so that only authorized users have access to the camera feed. This lets you use your webcam as a free CCTV system, without spending any money on it.
The interface for this IP Cam software is really simple and easy to use. Just start the software, grab the URL that is displayed, and watch your webcam over internet from any browser.
IpstreamWebCam is something that is small, lightweight and requires no installation. I used it with Windows 7 and found that it was pretty easy for me to set it up. Actually, I gotta rephrase it “no setup actually required” to use this software. All I had to do is to press a button to stream webcam over internet.
It actually turned my poor harmless looking webcam into a sophisticated IP camera. Let’s see how you can use it to stream webcam video.
How to Turn Webcam Into IP Camera:
What if you want to set up a surveillance camera but you don’t want to spend couple of hundred dollars to get one. Well, we can use this lightweight software to turn your webcam to surveillance camera. Nothing much to be done as you might wonder how to set up the whole thing.
Plug in your webcam and run IpstreamWebCam. This software would show the webcam attached to computer. Now, click on the “No Launched” button to stream webcam video. Now to view it, note down the link from the “Lan Camera URL” section and paste it in your browser and enjoy.
Stream WebCam to Media Player
Even cooler, try to copy the URL from the software into VLC player or any other media player that supports streamed stuff. You should be able to view the streamed video from IpstreamWebCam right inside your media player. As some of the browsers would require a plug-in to play videos, you can use a media player to view the streamed stuff over the web.
Well, he is my colleague, working really hard to conduce quality material to our website. I like to view the streamed video in a media player as it doesn’t bother my internet browser and I got more options to play around with.
Configuring IpstreamWebCam
You might not want your neighbour watching your streamed video from the webcam. Well, all he needs to know is the IP address. You can set up a password so that the streamed video from the software is only accessible to you or to any other authorized user.
You might want to play around with the ports if you want and change the FPS (Frames per second). The more the FPS is, the more lively the video would look however more data will be transferred over the network. Check out Frame Rate to know more about it.
You can also restrict the stream only to the local network to avoid the stream leaking out to the internet. Though not many options are available here, but we talked about simplicity. So there you have it, a simple and easy to use software to stream webcam over the network.
Conclusion
I found IpstreamWebCam very easy to use and its simple interface makes it really a piece of cake for users to deal with it. You don’t have to worry about choosing the right webcam as it detects it automatically and prints out the URL to be used.
If you’re looking for a simple and easy to set up solution to stream webcam and make it an IP Camera, this is the software you need.
Get IpstreamWebCam here for free
You might like to read about this amazing free online webcam recorder that lets you record videos from your webcam and store it online.
