VideoPeep: Veiled Sight. Having you small web-camera, you probably have thought of organizing a hand-made video surveillance system. Its tasks may be different: For example, you could want to control your children's or pets' behavior, or guard for the "unwanted visitors" when nobody is at home.

Whichever the case is, you will need the appropriate hardware and software. The hardware role can be successfully completed by a web-camera (all you need is to hide its "unmasking" lightning), and for the software I would propose you to use VideoPeep, a small utility.

VideoPeep is as simple as it possibly can be, but that does not deprive all the features users will need for the delicate business of video surveillance. It can write the camera's signal continuously, but such tactics would quickly lead to the disk overflow. A more interesting mode is "write on timer"; but the most suitable one is "write on motion detection".

In this mode, the video signal will be recorded only when the picture in the camera changes, and the number of the required changes can be set in the options. You can also control the picture compression rate (JPEG algorithms are used), recording frequency and files size (for example, you can set the file size to 60 min of video, so a 5-hour-long record would be stored in 5 files).

Some additional cool features provided by VideoPeep include the disk space control (the program will never leave less than 100 MB of free disk space) and internal simple web server (i.e., you can view the current camera picture in a browser from any computer on the network).