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I may be the only person in the universe to have never used a webcam.

I bought a new Raspberry Pi Camera Module and have used raspistill to take some pictures.

I want to set it up to monitor an area near my home and view video.

I thought this would be simple, but my initial searches have led nowhere. raspistill and raspivid seem to be about recording images (and don't even seem to have man pages).

The Foundation page on webcams suggests installing fswebcam then proceeds to explain how to take still images. The page on the Camera Module explains how to install and enable the module.

I am looking for a simple set of instructions to view and control images from my local internet. I am sure I could work it out myself, but every second person seems to be running a baby monitor or webcam to view their coffee machine.

Milliways
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  • I know you are capable of putting in some work with existing material and asking a more specific question; this one by nature ranks probably number #2 here to the kind of questions that you have dealt with in your networking catch-all. It is very frustrating that the Foundation seem to view documentation as an occasional afterthought (not to mention hypocritical, considering their "education" related goals), but while raspivid/raspistill don't have man pages (neither does the atrociously (un)documented vcgencmd), they do have fairly informative --help functions... – goldilocks Jun 01 '16 at 12:54
  • ...At least I think that is the switch, I will check with my camera pi in a minute, but it is basically this stuff: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/raspbian/applications/camera.md which if you pay attention to that and the various 1-2-3 type blogs/answers (including the dupe) you'll realize those programs aren't just "about recording images", although that is how they tend to work by default. They are about streaming formatted data from the camera. – goldilocks Jun 01 '16 at 12:54
  • Remember, there is no multi-billion dollar corporation with a staff of thousands to create slick consumer friendly plug and play apps here. Often the people who write open source software have their own goals in mind as opposed to trying to please everyone because someone is paying them to do so. So it goes. BTW the term "webcam" WRT consumer goods may be misleading in the sense that what it really refers to are just USB video cams -- that are used predominantly with software like "skype", etc., hence the nomenclature that it's a "webcam". – goldilocks Jun 01 '16 at 12:59
  • It is --help. Most of it is irrelevant to this but note to stream out you would use -o - then pipe | to whatever mechanism you want to use as a webfeed. There are hundreds of examples of this here and elsewhere. – goldilocks Jun 01 '16 at 13:30

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