I've been working on an amusing project for quite some time that will be better served with a wireless camera to snap photos of the action. I had been leaning toward the AIC250W due to its relative cheapness (approx $50-$100 depending on the mood at Fry's.) That and you can simply grab a copy of the current frame by making a web request to http://cameraip/IMAGE.JPG?cidx=randomtimestamp (Thanks to Scott Hanselman for that tidbit.) Unfortunately the camera has gotten a bit difficult to find, especially for a good price. Enter its successor - the Airlink SkyIPCam 500W - Wireless, smaller, supports "Night Vision", motion detection, etc, etc. More importantly, it was on sale for $70 a while back so I picked one up.

I finally got around to unboxing the thing yesterday and started fiddling with the included tools. PC only to setup, but once configured you can use a Mac / Linux to actually view the video / images / etc. The issue is that this is not what I want it for - I need to make quick snapshots. So I tried the link as described above - and of course it didn't work. Looked at the page source, but it mostly uses an ActiveX control or a Java applet so the actual HTML / Javascript is fairly useless. Tried Fiddler, but it would crash IE immediately when I accessed the video page. Time to pull out Wireshark. Captured a couple of seconds of traffic and found the clue I needed. The default view for this camera will give a live video stream (Motion JPEG format) - looking through the capture I found the initial HTTP request:

http://camip/cgi/mjpg/mjpeg.cgi

This will automatically feed you a binary stream of the current video. Now based on Scott's article above, I'm guessing there's some more processing that needs to be accomplished, but that's for another day. I still wanted an immediate snapshot of the current image. I fiddled with the URL a bit and finally found what I needed:

http://camip/cgi/jpg/image.cgi

This presented exactly what I wanted - a jpeg file of the current view. This still requires authentication (yes, I checked) so you do need to use a tool that supports user authentication (ie, wget --user username --password password http://camip/cgi/jpg/image.cgi) or code it appropriately into whatever tool you're using.

I do have a feeling there's also a way to get an MPEG4 version of the video based on a hint in the Users Guide, but initial tests haven't worked yet. My bigger pressing issue is getting the wireless networking working properly with the security settings I have in place... Anyway, I hope this helps someone - I'll reveal more of my project soon enough.