Turn your Webcam into a Surveillance Cam

Let your Webcam be your eyes and ears while you're away from home or the office. A simple Webcam costs about $20, and a good surveillance-software package can be downloaded for free or cheap.

I recommend NovoSun's free SurveillizCam Lite. This program can monitor your home and office by stably detecting motion and logging the surveillance video into an AVI file with MPEG1 or MPEG4 codecs. In SurveillizCam, you can define multiple regions in any channel for motion detection. By doing this, you can mask some unstabe areas on a video. Moreover, SurveillizCam uses an adaptive algorithm, which makes the detection more stable and reliable.

Everytime it will detects some abnormal motion in your place of monitoring, it will be notify you via sound alarm or live video. You can even configure the system to record the motion video into AVI on it's own. You can view all the logged videos with Windows Media Player or SurveillizCam's video management and playback system. Version 1.16.1 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.

You can try it and then upgrade to one of their paid packages which include sound recording, remote connection, scheduled recordings, and recording up to 16 channels (webcams) simultaneously.

Download SurveillizCam Lite here.