During the last week or so I've been having a lot of problems with my two security cameras. For a couple of years I've been using a Windows XP box running WebcamXP with 2 USB video capture devices and a couple of outdoor cameras. It's worked well enough, but now all of a sudden it will disconnect one camera or more commonly, switch one camera into a 320x240 picture. Sometimes rebooting helps, sometimes it takes a few reboots.

Today however no matter what I do I can't get it to work right. I remoted in and unplugged and replugged the USB capture devices, and suddenly I'm getting notifications that I should plug the device into a USB 2.0 hi-speed port. What? All of the USB ports on the Dell GX260 I'm using are USB 2.0!

Clicking the so very helpful little bubble gives me a list of USB controllers with secret codenames that is somehow supposed to clue me in to which USB port on my computer is hi-speed. Right. But they all are hi-speed so it doesn't really matter.

Thinking maybe the RAM had gone bad or the CPU fan was dying, I swapped out the entire computer for another identical one. No change. Not a hardware problem, Windoze has done something to the drivers.

After fighting with trying to find different drivers I gave up and installed a spare USB 2.0 PCI card. No help at all. I get the same message and Windoze continues to insist that I need to plug the device into a USB 2.0 port. I don't know if a Windoze update destroyed the USB 2.0 support or what.

It would seem at this point my only option is going to be to wipe the computer. I'm wondering if I can use Linux this time, but I don't have a lot of hope after the many other times I've battled with webcams under Linux.

I need a program that can handle 2 cameras, give me a web interface to download still images, and save all of the video to disk. When saving the video to disk it needs to split the video every 5 minutes into a new file.

If anyone has any ideas, please post a comment.