Serving an image from secure webcam

 I had a problem today, where I needed to get an image from a webcam and display it on a website. Sounds simple enough, but the url of the webcam contained the username, password and port so it had to be hidden. For example:

http://username:password@somewhere.com:1234/SnapshotJPEG?Resolution=320x280

My first though was to do

ImageNew( url )

But this returned the error:

The /snapshotjpeg image format is not supported on this operating system.



Use GetReadableImageFormats() and GetWriteableImageFormats() to see which image formats are supported.

That leaves cfhttp:

<cfhttp url="http://somewhere.com:1234/SnapshotJPEG?Resolution=320x280" 
  username="username" 
  password="password"
  result="webcam">

webcam.filecontent contains a Java object of type java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream. As the cfimage tag can accept a source of Base64 byte arrays, I simply called the toByteArray() of the Java object.

Here is the final solution:

<cfhttp url="http://somewhere.com:1234/SnapshotJPEG?Resolution=320x280" 
  username="username" 
  password="password"
  result="webcam">

<cfimage action="writeToBrowser"
  source="#cfhttp.filecontent.toByteArray()#">

As a side note, I did find that you can't pass the username and password in the url. If you do then you get a connection failure with the error:

I/O Exception: unknown protocol: username

• Posted in:
• ColdFusion

2 comments

1. That's very cool John :-).
   
   It's not properly "secure" though as the username and password are being passed over http.
   
   Comment by James Buckingham – April 30, 2010
2. @James, OK so it's not secure if you're sniffing http traffic, but I don't think the client wants to install an SSL cert on their home PC :)
   
   Comment by John Whish – April 30, 2010