How To Use Linksys Compact Wireless-G Internet Video Camera WVC54GC From Linux

The Linksys Compact Wireless-G Internet Video Camera WVC54GC is a Linux based wireless webcam with its own streaming web server built in. Windows users can view the video stream through their browser without the need to install any extra software other than allowing the supplied Active-X control to run. Unfortunately there isn’t much in the documentation about using this camera with Linux.

How To Setup Linksys Compact Wireless-G Internet Video Camera WVC54GC on Linux

1. Connect the camera, has built-in ethernet card, to a hub and connect your Linux computer to the same hub.

2. Change the IP address of your computer or add a new IP address - 192.168.1.10
Note: If your computers IP address is 192.168.1.x (where x is between 0 to 255) then you can skip this step.
Fedora Core / Fedora
a. Select (in menu) System->Administration->Network (Network Configuration utility).
b. Click on New and click Forward.
c. Choose the existing ethernet card (most likely eth0).
d. Statically set your IP address to be 192.168.1.10 and your subnet mask as 255.255.255.0.
e. Move Forward and Apply to setup the connection.
f. Activate the connection.

Generic Linux
a. Open a console and su as root
b. Go to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts
c. Make a copy of ifcfg-eth0 and rename it as ifcfg-eth0:1
d. Open the file and change IPADDR value to 192.168.1.10, change NETMASK value to 255.255.255.0

My ifcfg-eth0:1 looks like this:

TYPE=Ethernet
DEVICE=eth0:1
BOOTPROTO=none
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
IPADDR=192.168.1.10
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=no
PEERDNS=yes

3. Change the IP address of your camera
Note: You may skip this step if your computer’s original IP address is like 192.168.1.x and you have only one camera.

a. Find your computers IP address (IPADDR), Netmask & Gateway (if available) by opening /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. Note the values as you will need them soon.

b. Open your browser and go to https://192.168.1.115.

c. Click on Setup (login using admin as user name and password admin).

d. Change the IP address to a value that is available and accessible from your network. For example we use 172.16.0.x range of IP addresses (Netmask is obviously 255.255.255.0) and so I chose an IP which is available from my network like 172.16.0.10.

e. Fill in (Sub) Netmask and Gateway or DNS information from previous step and click on Apply.

Note: You may need to consult your sysadmin for steps d & e to get the required information.

4. You may optionally (recommended) change the default password of your camera.

5. Change your computers IP address back to normal or delete the extra IP address.

6. Unplug the webcam, remove the ethernet cable from it and then plug it back again. This will restart it in wireless mode.

7. Using your browser check if you can browse to https://cam.era.ip.address
where cam.era.ip.address is the webcam IP address you had changed to earlier.
If you face any problems, check the IP address you typed carefully.

You are done. Now go on to view the video from your camera in the next topic.

How To View Video From Linksys Compact Wireless-G Internet Video Camera WVC54GC from Linux

Run VLC media player and give it the following url https://cam.era.ip.address/img/video.asf
How to:
Click Ctrl-N and choose HTTP from Network tab and fill in your URL and click OK. That’s it.

Alternatively you can invoke it from command line as follows:
wxvlc https://cam.era.ip.address/img/video.asf

Note: Replace cam.era.ip.address with the actual IP address of your camera that you setup previously or the default IP address 192.168.1.115.

You can also use xine and mplayer. Personally I use only vlc.

How To Take Snapshots from Linksys Compact Wireless-G Internet Video Camera WVC54GC on Linux

From console type:
mplayer https://cam.era.ip.address/img/video.asf -frames 1 -vo jpeg
Notes:
1. You need to have mplayer installed for this. You can easily get it in your Linux distribution.
2. Change jpeg to png to save the image in png format.
3. You can change frames count to any positive integer to save that many images successively

How To Create Animated GIF Video From Linksys Compact Wireless-G Internet Video Camera WVC54GC on Linux

mplayer https://172.16.0.251/img/video.asf -frames 100 -fps 20 -vo gif89a
Notes:
1. Replace fps value with your desired frame rate (not more than 30) and frames with the number of distinct frames you want to capture.
2. frames / fps gives you the number of seconds of video that you are capturing
3. The animated gif loops around. You can manipulate the images from any Animated Gif editor.

Animated gif is poor mans video player. Here is how you can save video using a better format (mpeg) using VLC media player.