An old VHS camcorder (with a broken tape transport, obtained for about $90) is situated inside the experimental hall and connected via a long cable to a VideoPix board in a Sun SPARCstation 2.
At regular intervals (currently 1 minute) a program "vfc2ppm" is run to grab a frame and generate a PPM image, which is converted to JPEG using ImageMagick "convert". The hardware and conversion software is not sufficiently fast to permit regular use of a live shot, especially by many users.
The conversion logs are available.
A.Daviel