Webcams (take 1)

I'm playing with webcam systems at the moment. My first purchase was a Linksys WVC54G, a wireless camera, and compared to most of the other wireless cams around quite reasonably priced. It comes with a bunch of nifty services on free trials (such as MMSs when the motion detector is triggered). Setup was fairly simple (although it is notable that running WPA on our wifi net seems to defeat the small brain of this type of attached device). However, I can't say I'd buy another - because it only feeds IE or Linksys's custom software viewer. What kind of webcam is that? I've had a trivial prod at trying to access the MPEG4 stream otherwise, but the internal webserver seems determined to thwart me. Time to go buy one of the nice expensive AXIS ones, I think, to see if they do any better...