Active WebCam

Active WebCam is a webcam streaming app for Windows. The application allows you to stream not only your webcamera video, but also video from other devices hooked up to your computer.

Once you have added a new camera to the interface, Active WebCam can broadcast your content in several ways. It can connect to a Webserver or even upload the video to an FTP server. The most amazing is its built-in HTTP server. By activating this feature, the application will start its own webserver on port 8080 and create a basic web page for the video to be played there. Once the page is created and becomes active, a user can connect to the website by inputting the IP address of your computer. He will be asked what application he wants to use to see the video (the default option is Windows Media Player, which is a standard in the industry).

But the option I liked the most was a Java applet. Java is multi-platform, so everyone will most likely have it. Though a little bit slower, the Java applet allows to watch the video almost in real time. From the settings of your video feed, you can tone down the frames per second to decrease bandwidth usage. Ideally, you would want to be in the 15fps range, as anything higher than that will eat out your resources. Active WebCam supports several different input devices, so you can pretty much have 1-8 video streams going on at the same time on the HTTP server.