hi how do i have a live webcam feed on a web page

There's a number of ways of doing this depending on your webcam and your software. For example, we have a small camera in our office that runs a version of Linux and has an inbuilt webserver that displays a live feed and gives access to the camera settings, etc. Plugs right into an RJ11 socket.

Most standard webcams aren't this advanced though, so it'll probably need to connect to a PC, then you will need sotware to provide the feed.

Firstly, you've got to think about what you mean by 'live'. Do you want a moving picture, or a still picture that's updated at regular intervals? Although live moving feeds can be good, it'll eat a lot of bandwidth and might turn out to be very bad quality if there isn't enough bandwidth available.

Then you've got the issue of HTTP - (pages are downloaded as and when they are needed, a connection to the server is not maintained so that makes it hard to have streaming things on there). You would need some client side software, maybe a java applet or ActiveX control. This would most likely be provided by the software that comes with the camera (or bought seperatly).

Now you've got to think about the connection to the camera feed. A truly live moing picture feed will most likely require that the camera is plugged directly into the server - which means you will have to serve the feed directly from your home PC, leave it on and connected to a broadband connection.

You then need to link to your home PC site thats running the feed from your usual website. If you have a dynamic IP Address (which 99% of home users do), you will need a Dynamic DNS service such as no-ip or dyndns. Search google for more info. These will give your computer an internet domain name you can use to link to (such as myname.dyndns.com ).

All that can be quite a lot of bother... the other option is to have still images uploaded on a regular basis. Again, you could find software to do this. Microsoft actually have a free power toy you can download which will take images at regular intervals from the camera. You can the write a batch file or VBScript or something to upload the images for you, and then schedule it somehow..

A lot of software is there on the market that will post webcam pics.