Autocam in action. © 2009 Leigh McCulloch, All Rights Reserved.
If you have a computer on a secure network you'll understand the frustration in trying to access a webcam on the computer remotely. About the only way you can really monitor a room or desk when the computer is behind a NAT or firewall, is to have that computer upload to an FTP server. But what good is that? You then have to download the images individually, it's pretty painful. Plus most apps out there (free or paid) that do this, only allow uploading to a single file. So you'll only ever have the latest image.
That's why I wrote autocam. Autocam is programmed in Flash ActionScript 3, and basically sits there trying to load an image over and over. It correctly handles partial images, detecting if only part of an image has been uploaded onto the FTP server, as well as caches all the images it's currently loaded. On first load it automatically displays the latest picture uploaded, but dragging the slider at the bottom will disable the auto showing the latest, and will allow you to flip through all the previous files it has.
It's not ground breaking, and it isn't designed to solve all your problems. But it'll allow you to view a webcam, and then scroll back through frames you've downloaded. Use it for personal stuff, but © 2009 Leigh McCulloch, All Rights Reserved. If you use windows, you can use Fwink to upload from the webcam, and on Mac I think EvoCam does FTP too.
Download: autocam-1.1.zip
Update: A friend has written basically the same thing, but in Silverlight instead of Flash: autocam_silverlight.zip
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