Originally, home security systems make full use of VCRs to record any live video feeds. If you decide to go to court or to the police, you can use the video tape for evidence. Unfortunately, as you have known, the quality of images recorded on a video tape can fade away by time. With PC based surveillance system you can record images digitally.

Even better, with your PC and a surveillance software you can also record any events in a photo and/or video archive, starting just at the moment when a motion is detected. Besides for saving disk space, it is also not necessary to monitor your home all the time. However, there are times when you want to record the entire series of an event on your hard disk so that you can play it back later.

Similar to the advantage of using any ordinary webcam software, with WebCam Looker it is also possible to record images or video on local machine using video surveillance software. With this surveillance software you can accomplish recording by going into the Settings Dialog, choosing Sources Tab and then click the Continuous recording option. In the Destination List, click add. Notice that WebCam Looker allows you to add only one video destination if you use only one camera.

If no video filename is specified, videos will be saved in the archive. It is not possible to view video file during writing. To reduce the video files size you should use video compression. There are various types of video compression offered by WebCam Looker. To mention some of them: Cinepak, Intel Indeo, and MPEG4-2. To access the recorded videos you can go into Video Archive Menu. You can then playback any recorded videos according to the specified date and time.

Besides allowing you to specify a video compression format, another advantage of recording events with a PC is a surveillance software such as WebCam Looker, Active WebCam and Digi-Watcher also provides a feature that permits the user to set the frequency of image saving. Moreover, you can set it run at your desired time and duration by using Scheduler.