iCam brings video from home to the iPhone

Aug.06, 2009 in Tuaw

Filed under: Accessories, Software, Internet Tools, iPhone

I was intrigued by Lauren’s post the other day where she briefly talked about using the iCam phone app [App Store] to do some baby monitoring. I wondered what else I could do with this US$4.99 app, so I gave it a try with great results.

One nice thing about iCam is it can integrate up to 4 live video streams on your iPhone, even if the cameras are stand alone webcams or cams attached to different computers. In my case, I had a D-link webcam, a desktop mac with a Logitech webcam, and my MacBook Pro with a built in iSight camera.

I was able to bring all 3 onto a single screen on my iPhone and keep an eye on my house and parrot while I was out for dinner.

Here is the setup. You have to download an app called iCamSource to run on each computer that hosts a camera. It’s free. If your computer is hosting 2 cameras, you make a duplicate of the app and run it in a second instance. In my case, my desktop machine had the attached USB webcam, and I was also linking to the D-Link camera that has a built in web-server and a device specific IP address.

With the USB webcam, it was easy to find in the software by name. You enter a unique user name and password. For the second webcam, the D-link, I had to specify an IP address, followed by the required code to bring that camera up. Each webcam does it a bit differently. I asked the iCam support people, and after a few tries we found the right combo for that particular camera. Support responses were very quick, by the way.

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TUAW iCam brings video from home to the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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