I have a Logitech Quickcam for Notebooks Pro – decent camera, and it works under Linux thanks to the work of Nemosoft and now Luc Saillard via the pwc driver. Toss in the webcam application in xawtv, and I can take a snapshot of my garden, fishtank or whatever interests me every few seconds to every few minutes. It has the ability to upload a copy via ftp (using the ftp command line client), but it seems to have issues once in a while when trying to do this – resulting in a webcam page that doesn’t update.

The driver presents a v4l or v4l2 interface via the kernel, so it should be possible to write a small KDE application that takes advantage of the kio_slave features in KDE (transparent network access via many different protocols) to read a graphic from the v4l interface and use a kio_slave to push the resulting image file somewhere else. Heck, if the refresh rate isn’t too heavy, you might even be able to push the image to multiple locations at once.

The only drawback to this idea? I don’t know how to talk v4l(2) or how to write KDE apps. Perhaps someone browsing the net will see this posting and decide to write one!