The cameras can be installed up to 500 feet from the switcher and include cast-iron bases with screw holes for mounting on walls or ceilings and flexible pointing mechanisms. Though microphones and audio cables are provided, audio is not supported by the current software, which makes using the VTS 8500 as a live video feed for a Web site less than ideal at this time. During setup and registration, Inetcam creates all necessary Java and HTML files to serve the videos from any Web server, or you can cut and paste the Java control parameters into your own Web page format. If you don't have your own server, you can link to a free dynamic DNS service provided by Inetcam and serve video from any computer with an Internet connection, even if it doesn't have a fixed IP address. During operation, you control transmission parameters such as window size, frame speed, and compression rate, but you can't set a target transmission bit rate.
Viewers can adjust the brightness and contrast of the transmitted video and the compression ratio.
We tested playback on a variety of clients, with some as low as 28.8-Kbps connections. We achieved our best results using quarter-screen videos, enabling a display rate of between one and two frames per second, which was more than adequate for most monitoring tasks. All in all, though most tethered cameras claim some ability to enable remote Internet monitoring, the Inetcam VTS 8500 Color Video Transmission System is one of the first robust enough for serious applications.