What-now-ator?

Watchinator is a website that turns your webcam into a surveillance camera. By detecting video motion it can also serve as an alarm system. Set any alarm, and it will ring when an intruder passes the view of the camera. Bring a live link to work, and you can watch when something's happening at home.

Disclaimer

Although we try our best to provide you with a fun – maybe even useful – service, watchinator.com is not intended to serve as a full-fledged security system. We see ourselves solving the little, everyday cases, like:

• What's eating my gardenias?
• Who's stealing my mug at the office?
• Why is my fridge disorganized in the morning?
• How the heck does my pet always manage to break out?

A last note: Using this service to scare the life out of your friends should be okay; well, except from the actual life. But, please, respect people's privacy; don't use us in the girls' locker room.

One Minute Guide

Hopefully, Watchinator shouldn't be too hard to use.

If you want to, you can tweak the motion threshold using the slider below the preview video. Imagine that you're feeding the guard dog caffeine pills when sliding to the left, and sleeping pills when sliding to the right.

Currently, there are three types of alarms you can set to trigger when motion is detected. You can set any combination of these, including none of them. The first alarm plays a sound, the second alarm shows an image inside the Flash component, and the third alarm loads a new website in a new tab/window. You will need to enter valid URLs, and local files won't work.

If you check the Watch live from another computer? option, a link to your video stream is generated for you. As long as you keep the stream open, you (or anyone you share it with) can use this link to set up a so-called peer-to-peer connection, directly between your computers. You can leave all alarms off locally, and still hear a different alarm on the other end of this connection.

When you're ready, click Go! to activate the alarms. When you're done, click the X in the corner, and watch the gallery of snapshots taken while activity was registered. Remember to save the snapshots you want to keep before closing or reloading the page.

Enjoy!

#$%&*@!? (Troubleshooting)

Some firewalls may prohibit you from sending/receiving the video stream. If you have control over the firewall(s) in question, you can try allowing UDP traffic.

For those who have problems with irresponsive buttons in the Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog (a known issue with some browsers/platforms), you can go to Flash Player's Website Privacy Settings panel, locate watchinator.com, and select Always allow.

If the camera capture is pitch black, it usually indicates that you forgot to turn on the light in your room, or that the web camera is busy with another application. Flip the nearest light switch, close the suspected application, and try again.