I am trying to figure out a way to broadcast a beach cam feed from an IP camera. Currently I am using the cameras FTP server to upload and overwrite an image, then cycle it with some simple JS.
My goal is to create a streaming beach cam feed that I could watermark / embed using streaming instead of overwriting. Its hosted on a grid server which seems to be handling the daily traffic spikes ( most people check the cam in the mornings ).
I have read numerous tutorials on how to broadcast from your computer with a variety of software. However, this camera sounds out the feed all day every day and it would be nice not to tie up a computer just for that task. I have seen some standalone hardware that seems to be made for this process but I am not sure what the best route to take here. Any suggestions?
There are lots of standalone encoders out there. Most are actually more expensive than sourcing an old PC as they tend to be specialzied PCs under the hood. If you don’t need super-high resolution and framerates you can get away with pretty meager hardware – like an old core 2 duo mac mini – to handle the encoding and origination duties. Even if you need HD @ 29.97 FPS desktop PCs are still cheap enough to make it worthwhile; you can build a pretty solid i5 based box for $400.
I used a predecessor of this camera back in 2008 or 2009. Basically, plug it in to your network and open up the necessary port(s) in your firewall–no computer needed as an intermediary. I’m not sure if it has watermarking capabilities, but I don’t see why that wouldn’t be an included feature.
As for traffic…I have no idea how many visitors it could handle at a time. It might be in the specs.
So I will need to find the right outdoor cam that works similar to that one.
As for simultaneous users, that is the part where it gets tricky. Does that camera upload to a webserver or are you saying people can directly connect to that IP you open up? I need to take it a step further and upload that feed to a CDN. I looked into this a little in the past and it seems like you needed to run FLME or a program that rebroadcasts the stream from the delivery network to allow many people to view at any time.