Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2023 July 14

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July 14

bird feeder webcam

Resolved

I want to arrange a video camera (possibly with infrared capability for nightviewing) that feeds to a website or maybe (if this makes sense) just to a streaming URL that anybody on the internet can watch.

Please tell me the technicalities I should search for. Thank you! 174.89.124.77 (talk) 22:54, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

Do you not know how to perform an internet search? I typed in How to set up a live streaming webcam and the first hit was "How to Create a Webcam Live Stream on YouTube". Perhaps you could begin there. Wikipedia articles will tend to be overly technical and unhelpful, although I haven't looked. WP is not a repository of 'how-to' instructions. Anyway, speaking as a non-ornithologist, do many birds feed at night? I thought they tended to sleep, except owls, night-jars and -ingales. MinorProphet (talk) 23:45, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

OK, yes, Google is an available option. Normally it leads with a link to something commercialized like "How to Create a Webcam Live Stream on YouTube" and then follows with intelligence-insulting (and often inaccurate) "People also ask..." bullets; whereas questions to the Wikipedia reference desk (which is very often not so much guidance about Wikipedia articles but instead an excellent source of 'how-to' instructions) often pays off very quickly. Although, this time, you answered. Hayttom (talk) 02:32, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

A basic self-hosted option would be to take a simple IP camera, and pipe the direct video URL from that into Icecast. Anyone with a link to the Icecast server would be able to view the stream. freedns.afraid.org provides no cost (sub)domain and DDNS services which can be updated with shell scripts or even just Wget/cURL. Maybe 30 minutes of configuration if you're competent with Linux (IDK anything about Windows!). Could pipe it to YouTube using a Raspberry Pi with Camera Module (or similar) with something even simpler like this (and these). -- dsprc ^[talk] 02:44, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, dsprc! This is what I needed to know. Hayttom (talk) 13:25, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

@Hayttom: Glad my ramblings were helpful! Some addendum:

I recommend Icecast so there is at least something sitting between the horribly vulnerable IP cam and global internets. It also provides access controls, rolls-based multi-user support, management of multiple feeds, statistics, its own integrated Web server, etc.

Icecast's base configuration setup is pretty straightforward and dead simple… but… for video, IIRC, there may be additional compute overhead as it has to transcode video in real-time for the viewing end of the stream – which may or may not be hardware accelerated (it's been many years since I experimented with the video features).

Icecast runs well on cheap DigitalOcean droplets, but can eat into bandwidth allocations, as the VPS is always ingesting the camera's feed, even if no one is currently watching it. Slurping down video from a self-hosted home server would sidestep that limitation. If local bandwidth at home is an issue, and if you don't mind the Eye of Sauron's ever watchful gaze upon you: can always backhaul it up to YouTube. -- dsprc ^[talk] 16:53, 16 July 2023 (UTC)