XCam XRay

by Rick LaBanca

Software

To obtain pictures via e-mail or a direct Internet connection, there is software for the USB cable included with XRay. Two programs are used, a server to run on your machine with USB cable, and a client to run a computer elsewhere, on the Internet

Features include uploading or emailing pictures at specific intervals (via Internet), or fetching them from the computer using the client software. It also can detect a distinctive ring and automatically know to dial your ISP and upload them. It can also act when it detects motion in the video.

Note: The software I reviewed is marked as beta on X10's site. Get the latest at http://www.x10.com/xrv. I needed to use the beta because as noted below, nothing would run until now, and I wanted to review this before the summer!

I do have the software running, but fair warning that it took me a while. I had to wait about six weeks until there was a beta that would work on my system. The software looks nice and runs now, but I gather that X10 doesn't have a huge software staff to do QA etc.

Running the software is pretty simple, just open it up and it's going. There are a large number of settings, many that don't seem to apply to anything! These extra settings such as pan, tilt, options for streaming video etc. These may hint at future products, but X10 said that they are just part of the driver used... whatever that means. In any case they can be confusing if you think they do anything.

If you have a firecracker, you can set the com port and it can send x10 commands to turn on and off cameras assumed to be hooked to an appliance module. It can automatically rotate between them. Good ideas, but why not cm11a support as well?

What the software does is snap an image once every so many seconds (from 10 to 999). It stores these in a list, based on a count (50 default) or disk space percentage. Sizes supported are 160x120, 320x240 or 640x480.

One annoyance is that when it starts, I get "unable to open comm port", which should be no big deal since I'm not using a modem! Maybe some hidden setting is bad that I missed however.

One of the coolest sounding features is that it can detect motion and do things based on that, wow! Well not so wow.

You can set the software to e-mail you if motion is detected. There is a slider to adjust how sensitive it is. It seems to work well in detected, but not mailing. It never mailed a thing to me. Even if it did, it's not very useful, why you ask??

The xray's idea of motion is the difference between two images. Not 30 frames per second images, but two of your snapshots! So if you have it set to snap once every 30 seconds, and in-between that time someone does a 10 second dance in front of the camera, you've got diddly! Too bad, I was looking forward to that feature!

Another option is to "mark motion", which draws squares indicating what moved. So when I did happen to detect this "pseudo-motion" it was marked with little squares where things changed (sorry lost my screen shots!). This confirmed to me that it was detecting motion, but the emailing didn't work.

I didn't fully test the program, but will try to experiment with the automatic uploading etc. What I was initially interested in was controlling it remotely. What I assumed was the remote software would let me see what was snapped as it was snappin'.

The software ran fine at my office on NT, but I couldn't connect! I entered in my home ISP and no dice. My machine was fine (web server was OK). So I tried the alternate.

When you start the program, an ID is displayed when you put it in server mode. This ID is used alternately to connect to the server. How it works, I don't know but it did. My first guess was that the ID was connecting to some central x10 location and finding my address, but if that was the case, why did connecting via my IP address not work? Mystery.

Once running, I was thinking it was broken. No images. But oh, here it is, I have to download them! You select and option to get pics, and set how many you want (say 20), and it downloads the most recent 20. But that appears to be it! If your camera snaps another, you have to download it manually, no auto fetching. Now I may have been way off and missed it, but it sure seems that this is all it can do. Let me know if I'm wrong!

So the remote was OK, but a pain to download all those pics, and flip through them. By the way, that is even a bit tedious as there is not a way to auto flip through them, you have to click 50 times to see 50 pics. Supporting a hold down of the mouse to flip would be nice.

I see potential for the program, but it sure does act like what it is, a beta. It really needs to be debugged and get rid of all the extra options that aren't used. Minimally it would need to auto download pics as they are snapped, and better yet auto download pics only if motion occurs. A real motion detect is my biggest disappointment, I had my expectations too high.

But don't despair, other companies probably have monitoring software that will do a better job. If you know of one point me there, or better yet review it for us! The XCam appears to work with most video apps such as netmeeting so it may be possible to use something better.

I will continue to look at the software and update this review if I find anything else, or find things I just plain missed! Since the software is free you can't complain, unless you were really planning on using the Xcam exclusively for this stuff.

Rick