Puffin Cam

What is it?

There's lots of nice WebCam software out there. Many offerings did almost what I needed and were just about usable but had funny quirks, didn't like all my cameras, were not totally free or just didn't feel right. Whatever. I eventually decided that the only way to get what I wanted was to write the dern thing myself, and Puffin Cam is the result. It's pretty simple. It does what I want in the way I like. If it suits you and you find it useful, that's cool. If it doesn't, never mind. If you think there's some enhancement could be made, or you find a bug, please do let me know

Features

It's a webcam - what can I say? Here's a quick rundown:
  • DirectShow WDM and VfW grabber support
  • Access to camera controls (brightness/contrast etc)
  • Choice of image sizes
  • JPEG creation with definable quality
  • Captioning with optional date and quick entry.
  • Graphical logo overlay (GIF/PNG/JPEG/BMP)
  • FTP upload, including use of tempfile and 'site' command
  • Recent activity log
  • Most recent image and live view side-by-side
  • Definable grab/upload period with countdown and Pause feature
  • Iconise to System tray, grab from tray, tray icon grab notification
  • Almost zero CPU usage while minimized pending grab.
  • Cute puffin icon
  • Simple auto-brightness image enhancement (for basic cameras)
  • Save as local file (or to fileserver) as well as FTP upload
  • Workaround buggy webcam drivers w.r.t. hidden grabbing
  • Image archive

Downloads

The latest version, 0.2.4, is here Previous version, 0.2.3, is here.


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