It's been almost four months since I looked at a webcam. I hadn't even bookmarked the ones I had found, so I had to re-collect the links all over again.
The first one, and probably the best webcam view of Worcester, is the T&G webcam.It's a shot of Main Street in front of City Hall, from a cam that's mounted on one of the girders supporting the big sign on top of the T&G building on Franklin Street.
The cam updates about every 7 or 8 seconds, and is running 24/7.
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The City Hall webcam looks straight back across the Common from the back of City Hall.It's a good webcam, updating once a second and running 24/7.
Of course, being focused on the entrance to the city's most notoriously empty building does seem a bit tacky at this point.
The blurb under the image might need a bit of updating, too.
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Clark University's Red Square webcam is a full motion stream, but times out after 2 minutes or so, in order to give others a chance... or so they say.It's a great shot from the University's oldest and most iconic building, facing straight out towards Main Street.
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The only active WPI webcam I could get to come up shows a view of the new residence hall that's under construction.Searching for webcams at the city's electrical engineering school, though, you'd expect to find a lot of high bandwidth and interesting video streams...
This one only updates every five minutes, though. It's a more efficient use of the bandwidth, I suppose.
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The Holy Cross webcam looks down into the quad in front of lower Hogan, and almost out across the city... but not quite.At night, though, you can catch the streams of headlights and tail-lights on the distressway at the top of the frame.
This one updates once or twice a second.
3 comments:
Jeff: There's a master list of webcams here:
http://worcesteractivist.org/wiki/Webcams
WA list doesn't have the Clark U webcam, and all the links they do have are only for single frames. All the active cams are streaming between full motion (Clark) and one frame every 7 to 8 seconds (T&G), ...and then the two WPI cams that only update the image once every five minutes.
Live webcams were hot when they were new, since everyone believed that the compression schemes would bring the bandwidth needed for full motion down enough to make them practical. But they're still bandwidth hogs, the closer to full motion they are. It's interesting how their popularity has dropped off, now that everybody has seen the individual (home user level) investment in bandwidth needed to support one.
Jeff: It's a wiki, so anyone can add more info if they have the time. (It focuses on still frames because it was drafted by people who wanted to work with the webcam images without dealing with screengrabs; Radioball is one blog that hotlinks to the latest City Hall still frame.)
Thanks for pointing out the Clark one--I should add that to the list myself.
Other fun Worcester webcam tricks include time-lapse movies:
http://www.pieandcoffee.org/2005/10/26/remembering-2000-us-dead-in-iraq/
http://worcester.indymedia.org/node/1282
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