Puffin Cam

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

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