Webcam recommendations

[grarpamp]

Hi. I know nothing about the current state of webcams :)
Over 10yr ago I had a composite cam and bt848 capture card.
I figure USB is the standard these days.
Something from the typical places: BestBuy, MicroCenter, etc.

My use case is 24x7 room/security recording, audio, and low light/IR boost.
And camming with people over a decent net with say 384-512k speeds.
I doubt my other net with up to 5s lag and 128k or so would be usable.

I figure USB cams are commodity these days.
But if there's some obvious gotchas with FreeBSD to look out for
when buying, I'd appreciate knowing.
And of course if there's a brand/line that is well supported and
'just works great', that would make life easy :)

I'm better at sifting through software so I should be ok there.
I'll need encrypted streams and Windows interop, a few packages
seem to do that. Though more work, I can always use IPSEC/OpenVPN.

The only thing I don't know about is what software would let me do
the security monitoring thing and ignore all but frames that have
motion in them? Maybe that's a program feature of the cam itself?
Because disk space and time to scan idle periods for events isn't cheap.

Hopefully this thread will serve to help others too :) Thanks.