My Thoughts

My first thought was to update the Orite camera to a newer firmware version. (If in doubt, update, cross fingers and see if that fixes anything without breaking anything else.) Unfortunately it seems I had an older version which couldn't do field upgrades. After a lengthy conversation with the Canadian rep, who seemed less than reliable at first, I shelled out a few bucks to upgrade to the newest hardware version. Finally after getting the unit back, I found nothing new :(
I did manage to dig up some technical information from the rep's website though. The camera provides JPEG still frame and MJPEG live stream interfaces.

See Update Below

Providing a live stream is obviously the most difficult, but its also the most rewarding. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox based browsers support displaying an MJPEG stream natively. So now I had support for two major browser groups, the ActiveX control from the manufacturer for IE and the MJPEG stream for Netscape & Mozilla based browsers. I wanted universality though. It then boiled down to JAVA. I evaluated many many packages and they all sucked in some way or another. I settled on Cambozola (I'm still hoping Cortado will get updated and work better). There were still issues with permissions and functionality though. I didn't want to expose the IP camera itself too publicly, ideally I wanted it on the internal private network with the viewer on a public webserver. Unfortunately JAVA's security prevents an unsigned applet from accessing remote locations. I ended up setting up a proxy for the JPEG and MJPEG data from the camera on the webserver for the JAVA applet to use (webcamproxy.php). This prevents having to sign the applet with weak or unknown credentials. (At one point I remember having to click "I trust Andy." hehe) The proxy also inserts a timestamp into the JPEG data (timestamp.php). I went with an older version of the applet because it seemed to work better. The JAVA applet, although it works, doesn't work well enough to use exclusively. So with the ActiveX, MJPEG and JAVA live streaming versions I had enough to support any reasonable browser that could display a live stream, but I needed to select the optimal version for each browser. I used the Full Featured PHP Browser Detection & OS Detection code to do basic auto-select but allow a manual override (live.php). So thats the bells and whistles, a few basics to tidy up. The main page provides a basic JPEG image that is refreshed using javascript (index.html). It ended up after working on all this, that a borrowed ActiveX control from Axis (another webcam company) worked better than the one provided by Orite (The Orite control (WinWebPush.cab) is provided by the webcam chip manufacturer, Winbond).

Update
I wasn't quite satisfied with the performance of the webcam. Each viewer would end up running off a separate stream to the webcam (which lead to a few cam crashes) and they would run the live stream as fast as they could or until I ran out of bandwidth. Instead I inserted Motion between the webcam and the website. It grabs a single stream from the cam and distributes to the web. It adds the ability to produce an configured frame rate mjpeg stream, as well as to vary frame rate based on detected motion or idle state. It also adds its a timestamp and can generate periodic snapshots and many other image modification abilities. I also changed the live page to use mjpeg for Safari and Konquerer which now support mjpeg natively.

If you want to revert to the simpler method without motion, change webcamproxy.php as follows:
- motion server->webcam address and change the port too (8081->80 likely)

JAVA applet: webcamViewer.jar

ActiveX control: AMC.cab

webcamproxy.php:

live.php:

index.html:

motion.conf excerpts:

Although Motion supports periodic output I already had it setup via script running with cron.
grab.sh: