Though short on elegance and tutorial help, HomeWatcher does a fine job at what its name implies. You can instruct the application to take periodic snapshots and video snippets through any standard Webcam, then save and FTP them to your Web site. The same operations can also run if the software notes a change in the viewed image, whereupon an alarm can play and an unlimited number of e-mail recipients can be notified.

Getting quality results takes some tinkering. For example, the default setting had two uploads scheduled per minute, but the uploads were so large and our upload speed so slow that the program simply ran continuously. We also found that the default compression value of 80 percent rendered the program's automatic digital zooms on action areas virtually unintelligible. But with a lot of option exploring and fine tuning, HomeWatcher ran like a champ. Better still, you can maintain multiple cameras by keeping multiple versions of the software open— a serious plus for the security conscious.