I have written a Python script to download a webcam image at a configurable interval. I am currently testing it with the BBC’s three Aberystwyth webcams. Although it should work with almost any webcam. I will use these images to make time-lapse style video.
The script uses the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers in the GET request to ensure the same image is not downloaded twice. The script is capable of regularly downloading images from several webcams. I will be using either ffmpeg or mencoder (from the mplayer project) to create the videos.
Thanks to Matthew Russell (aka horizon5) for help with threading. Thanks also to Gary Steele for his page on creating videos from a series of images.
For those who want to run it themselves, I’ll put it online in a few days to download once I know it works properly and the code is tidied up a little.