Reviews

Webcams Suck on OS X, but one app shines...

by Scott Haneda, Contributing Editor

It all started a few years ago, I had a Hi-8 video camera, and a IX Micro Twin Turbo video card laying around. With not much to do with either of the 2 items, and a spare Power Computing Power Tower Pro 225, I rigged it all up and got a home webcam working. Back then, I was using software under OS 9 called SiteCam. It was a privately developed application that simply rocked, it was stable, rock solid, supported streaming, multiple cameras, and even cameras with pan, tilt and zoom as well. With it being the best there was, they were bought out, sold out, whatever you want to call it, and now, the software is held by a company called NuSpectra http://www.nuspectra.com/sitecam/index.htm and costs $150.00. I was not willing to dish out the cash for this, and after reading some reviews, I found that it no longer was all that great anyway. Add to that there is no Mac OS X support, and that was pretty much a show stopper for me. No need to email me and tell me you are running it on OS X, I already know it runs, however, the site clearly says it is NOT supported. I will not review software that is not supported under OS X, period. Why would anyone want to spend $150.00 to run something that they can not get support for is beyond me anyway.

I was feeling bored, I was in CompUSA, I had just got yelled at by some gnome who told me to stop touching the Cinema Display, which was so covered with dust it was a shame. I used a soft touch and the end of my flannel to clean it off while looking for dead pixels. Authoritative PC sales boy comes to the Cinema Displays rescue, and saves it from the hands of one like me. As you all know, I hate Macs and do all I can to keep people from buying them ;-), cleaning a display is a sure fire way to get someone to not want one. Duh!! After a little asserting myself to the ever so knowledgeable CompUSA whipping boy, I wandered around looking for Mac OS X webcam's. I had a machine in mind, I have hacked and rigged up a old busted up Imac into a sort of media server, (blatant plug) which you can take a look at here http://www.newgeo.com/imac/. With my system requirements being USB only, I thought I should be totally AOK and have tons of options. Not the case, seems Orange Micro http://www.orangemicro.com/ is making cameras, they have Firewire and USB models, Firewire was out for me, as I only had a old Imac, USB was in, or so I thought, according to the website, it is USB 2 and not supported on the Macintosh. I wander around some more, and find a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000, which clearly states it is a PC only camera. However, it is all they have in stock, is affordable, and is USB, so it met my needs. The PC guy assured me it was not Mac compatible, which just annoyed me, so I decided to buy it anyway. I got home, took about 20 minutes to unpack the thing out of the plastic case that they ship these cameras in, and plugged it into my Imac, of course, nothing, it did not work, but I was not about to let the PC guy be right! Some quick googling and I found a option for drivers that support this camera under OS X at http://www.ioxperts.com/usbwebcam.html, they even have Firewire drivers as well at http://www.ioxperts.com/dcam.html. Once installed, all appeared to be working, but the driver has this time limited feature, and you have to pull the camera and plug it back in to start over. With only 30 minutes of test time in-between, I decided to just buy it at $19.95. After all, it is just a driver, and it seemed to be working, what more did I need other than to find some good webcam software.

I am going to kind of switch things around here and talk about something I only learned about much later in my testing. First, the quality of your digital feed from the camera is only as good as the driver. I found there is one more driver out there, and it supports my camera as well. Mac USB Webcam, from http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/ is open source, free, and on my setup, totally reliable. However, I strongly urge you to test both drivers and see which is best for you. I plan a full review of both drivers in a future articel, so stay tuned. Now, with the drivers out of the way, I could finally get on with locating some software that would actually show the world what I am up to 24 hours a day.

When it comes to software, under OS X you have 3 options, Quicktime Broadcaster, which is free, I am not going to cover it, as it is a broadcasting only solution, and most of you will not have the bandwidth to properly support it. That leaves you with EvoCam http://www.evological.com/evocam.html and ImageCaster http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/imgcast_overview.html. I feel it is my duty to be honest about all this, so I will. I used ImageCaster first, mainly because I emailed the guy, and he actually got back to me promptly. My inquiry was as to what the software could do. The online pages clearly say "Broadcast several different webcam images simultaneously." Now I don't know about you, but I hear the word "broadcast" and I think live stream, not the case, it is ftp upload to a remote server, or save images locally and have Apache serve them. To be fair, at the time EvoCam played the same game, and did not offer real streaming either. I emailed EvoCam support and it took 2 weeks for me to get a reply, so I went with ImageCaster, which I also purchased, and which was also a mistake. ImageCaster, while it does work, proved to be a huge CPU hog, and was a little on the cumbersome side. Its interface takes up most of your screen, and with all the CPU hogging it was doing, proved painstaking to control. I also found some problems with it that were enough to start me on a quest for an alternative. Namely, you can not tell ImageCaster to start up minmized to the dock. This interfered with me running iTunes via a KeySpan remote, as ImageCaster was always getting in my way. The bottom line with ImageCaster, support is poor, interface is clunky, CPU usage is off the charts, and it constantly has small crashes that show up in your crash log, but are not severe enough to take the application down.

That being said, I started playing with EvoCam, it is the same price, and after the initial delay in support, I had constant dialogue with the developer. Furthermore, it supports real time streaming as well. It is a straight forward application to use, anyone can figure it out without reading any docs, and yes, you can even tell it to startup as a hidden or minimized window. EvoCam supports multiple cameras, motion detection, special effects, oh, did I mention real time streaming :-) and a ton of other useful features. You can upload images via ftp, or save them locally and have Apache serve them out for you. Rather than me type too much, I think the feature set speaks for itself...

I really can not say enough good things about EvoCam, the state of webcams on the Macintosh under OS X is in shambles, and if it were not for EvoCam, I would embark on software development of a application of my own, however, EvoCam is just perfect, and should suit the beginner to advanced user just fine. Also worth mentioning, it even runs on pre OS X machines as well. Well worth every cent of the $20.00 that is requested for the software. I had 2 small complaints about the software, one is that it takes ages to set the refresh value by clicking these little up/down arrows, I think we are all grown up enough to enter in a value with the keyboard :-) and the other has to do with how you save your settings, which always is a "save as" requiring a few extra steps in dialog boxes. Again, purely cosmetic and not feature stoppers at all.

If you would like to see the camera in action, I have set it up in 2 instances, one as a non streaming refreshing page, and another as a real live stream. You can view those links as long as the server can handle the load at http://www.newgeo.com/ there are 2 links on the page, one is to the streaming feature, and the other to a refreshing upload once every 4 seconds.

Scott Haneda is a leading authority on absolutely nothing at all, from time to time, he writes things that are hardly worth reading. If you have read this far, it is no doubt a Friday evening, and you are even worse off than Scott. If you would like to make any comments on this, you can email ScottHaneda@osxfaq.com I am sure you will get a reply immediately, as he has nothing better to do.