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Thursday, 24 December 2015

Birdcam - the YouTube generation

It's fair to say that Twitter and Facebook have somewhat subsumed this blog in terms of where my day-to-day updates appear; that friends and families can see my words, sounds and pictures among others, as opposed to a standalone location.

There's something to be said for keeping the content 'local' - not trusting it to other service provides, but we'll see how that turns out!

In the meantime, though, I was visiting my younger sister a few days back and was delighted to see a service called Earthcam, which shows live images and video from cameras across the world.

It put me in mind of the camera that I set up to keep track of the visitors to our bird feeders at the back of our house. In the last year I upgraded it to a higher resolution camera, but it became very difficult to stream the video, since it's using a completely different system to transmit it through the network, and it's very difficult to convert that into a medium that can easily be seen on a browser.

In fact, I spent many a weekend trying to use tools like VLC and FFMPEG, which kind-of worked, but ended up using far too much of my computer's CPU to be able to stream for any length of time - I don't like it running too hot.

However, a brief bit of research in a quiet hour this morning brought me to Open Broadcaster Software and its ability to stream to the new Youtube Live - after just half an hour of installing and playing with the settings, I was able to create a stream of the birdcam running with just 8% CPU.. perfect!

So if you'd like to see the camera (and if it's working!) please click here:

Happy Christmas (it's a bit damp here!)

Posted by james at December 24, 2015 2:20 PM