Can Anybody ID This Server/Cam Type?

[PeteCress 0]

The link is http://www.schooners.com/multimedia/sunsetcam.htm

 

Screen snap at http://tinyurl.com/8fhdhkn

 

What is conspicuous about it for me:

 

• In spite of the progress bar at the bottom, it is a live feed.
  .
  
• The motion is very very good.

 

I have several links with apparently-identical presentations and all of them are really good.

 

e.g.

http://www.surfchex.com/nags-head-web-cam.php

http://www.surfchex.com/topsail-island-web-cam.php

 

 

My agenda is a couple of surf cams I'm running via Blue Iris. My hope (however faint...) is that there's something besides humongous bandwidth behind the cam cited above.... Maybe something that I can implement without going to a very high monthly IP bill.

[tomcctv 187]

Hi. PeteCress sorry i cant tell you the camera type. but the software used is easy and will work with your software. free download link sent via PM.

[buellwinkle 0]

This is how it's done, in case you don't know. You signup with a streaming service, They take the feed from your camera so you'll need enough bandwidth to support this single stream. For a 1080P camera using h.264 compression, say at 15 fps, you need about a 4-6 Mb/s upload speed link if you have a good circuit, half that at 720P.

 

What they do is convert your feed to flash like the one you provided above and you add the code on your site to play that in a flash player box. The player box is really designed for videos like AVI files, but they adapted it for live feeds, hence the controls or times that read zeo since it's streaming a live feed, there is no end time. Pretty easy to do, especially since the service you hire will probably give you the code you cut/paste into your website and you are done.

 

I heard there was a service in South America that was cheap, like $100/mo. I can look for it if you want that and I hear they speak english. Most are going to probably be closer to $300-500/mo and up depending on how many people use your site.

 

Can you do it yourself, heck yeah, but it may cost you more as you'll need at least a partial D3 digital circuit depending on the number of concurrent viewers you want to support and the resolution you want to support them at. Also, you can't use BlueIris or direct to camera for that, can't handle the load. You'll need a rtsp to flash streamer and there's open source for that, but it takes a while to set it up. I did it for fun once, but it wasn't easy and I was a software engineer.

 

If you really only expected 2-3 people using it at at a time, then you can just embed the video directly from the camera on your site and run it on your webserver at home or work. Then cut the resolution and frame rate down a lot until your internet connection stops crying.

[PeteCress 0]

This is how it's done, in case you don't know....

That one made it to my "Keepers" file... exactly what I was trolling for.

 

The bad part is that the guy paying for these cams is living on the edge and $100/month is out of the question. Geeze, I couldn't even get him to pony up $50 month for a Comcast IP service instead of 45kB/s DSL... and we wound up hosting from a friendly person in the vicinity that already had Comcast.

 

The good part is that it seems like the pitiful motion and time-to-connect on my cams (as compared to those I cited) is no longer on me - and now I know what it takes...

 

Thanks again.

[buellwinkle 0]

The javascript code TheUberLord wrote can probably do some effective streaming to a web page, albeit limited to the internet connection you have. It's written for Foscam but with a little tweaking you can adapt it for ACTi (this is for your new ACTi camera or another camera?). If I have time next week I'll play with it. Haven't coded in Java or JS in years so bear with me.

[Peter_ 2]

Instead of streaming, why not just have a single frame on the page update every 10 seconds or so? Saves on bandwidth, and you could use a higher resolution photo(s) to show people?

[buellwinkle 0]

I have mine update via FTP every hour. The problem with most cameras, FTPing every 10 seconds is that while it's FTPing, which can be significant with a higher res image, you'll either get a corrupted or partial JPG if you use the same name. Most cameras mitigate this by not allowing you to specify a name and using a time stamp or serial number, but then you can't access it easily from your web page. Mobotix is the only camera I know of that knows you want a single name, so it FTPs a temporary name and then renames the files at the end of the FTP so that you never get a corrupted or partial image.

 

It's actually easier to provide a snapshot directly from the camera at the time someone visits the site and they can refresh the page to see current image. Or you can put in javascript to update the image every so often as theuberlord suggests in his code sample for Foscam.