Converting an old cell phone into a webcam

I have an old T-Mobile MDA. It has WiFi, Windows Mobile and a camera. I would like to convert it to be used as a baby monitor. Ideally, I could do this with just be a port of VLC to Windows Mobile, but I didn't see any binaries of that sort.

Does anyone have any suggestions? All the hardware is there. I just to write or use an application that will put all of the pieces toge开发者_开发技巧ther.

Interesting question. I have thought of doing something similar myself sometime ago. I don't see the mobile server to be a problem, since you can always write a custom TCP application on the mobile device and connect it to a "proxy" application in the PC that will act as the VLC server.

The problem is the camera API. The blog post suggested by Matt is the best source of information you can get. Unfortunately not all driver implementations support the full DirectShow specification. This means that even if you climb the really steep DirectShow learning curve, you may find out that your device doesn't play nice with it.

I suggest that you start your research from the camera driver of the device at hand. It will be difficult or impossible to build something that it will work in all devices.

I don't know of any software that will do what you want straight out of the box, but the way I would go about it would be to write an app that took camera shots every so often and stored them on the device, then run a web server on the device to serve the image. (or copy it from the device to another machine over the network)

OpenNetCF Consulting have a product called padarn which is a web server that runs on windows ce (WM 5.0 and up according to their docs)

Here's another mobile web server.

Also here's a blog post about writing a timed camera capture app.