I am very interested in the idea of using low quality video creation tools, such as cell phones and web cameras, to produce online media content. I am also interested in playing around with the idea of surveliance and photography. Last semester my final project was an interactive photograph. When you touched the photographic projection in a certain places the image would change and in one particular place the image would become a snapshot of the viewer standing in front of the web camera. The snapshots, when created, were saved to the hardrive of my computer, but I had ultimately wanted them to be displayed online in some form so that the display itself became an online camera. Unfortuately, I did not have the knowledge then to make this work. For my midterm project, I would like to expand upon this idea, looking ultimately to recording small segments of video from the web camera rather then just jpeg images. I am going to modify the BestPixelTracker class so that it recognizes a specific color automatically, probably something easy like red or orange, When a color like this is in front of the camera a snapshot of the viewer will be taken and automatically uloaded to my server using the code from webCam. Then the picture will be emailed to a specific email address using a perl script where another perl script that is set to automatically check the email every minute will post the image to a blog.

Thanks to Shawn, I already have part of this working. He gave me a script that checks an email address and posts video, sound or photographs to a blog using xmlrpc. I created an email address for my dreamhost account and modified the script to work with this account and my blog This is actually supposed to be used to send video from a camera phone. It works pretty well right now. You can view some tests at http://www.catmindeye.com/video or post to the blog by sending a picture or video to blogpost@catmindeye.com. The part that I am having trouble with is the script that takes the image from the server and emails it to this account. I have looked into the perl sendmail stuff but have not found anything yet that I can understand which sends mail with an attachment. I am thinking that I may modify the script I already have so that it checks a folder on the server instead of an email address but I'm not sure if that is going to work yet.

Here is a link to the script Download file