Category Archives: video

video (category auto created by Wordpresser)

The outdoor sky/clouds have joined my plants stream

I decided to add a 5th camera to the live stream of my plants (not) growing. This new camera captures the outdoor sky/clouds, and serves as a natural reference to what time of day is it, since I do not overlay any date or time indication in the sources. As I write, it is dark outside – not the best timing :).

For now, the stream is available on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/arturmarques_dot_com.

In the past, instead of a live stream, my option was to build time-lapse videos. To assist in the process, I coded solutions that build automatic time-lapse videos from images datasets, with configurable quality. When using these tools, I usually build 24 hours videos, but I could request the output of a larger or shorter time span – for example, I have enough material to construct months-long files. The key reason why I have not been doing so, is that I have moved much of the raw data to the cloud, which is not as instantaneously readable, as local physical volumes. When I started playing with these media and doing these easy, fun, observations, one key reward was being able to promptly unveil whatever had happened in the past x hours.

I will adapt my solutions to the new cloud storage and automate the process again. Until then, the live stream should be available with some regularity.

My plants, (not) growing, LIVE! On Twitch

For long, I have been having fun with timelapse videos of my plants growing. Some of those videos have reached
this blog @ https://arturmarques.com/wp ;
and
my main youtube channel @ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUa0DzKskGo0iRYP8QzWsvA/

Today, I decided to combine the streams from four of the cameras that take the raw snapshots for the timelapse videos, into a single video feed. I am putting it live on Twitch:

@ https://www.twitch.tv/arturmarques_dot_com

It is live from my place, but it is all fully automatic. I am not monitoring the Twitch room and feedback, if any. It is an experiment, to check how reliable the stream can be, and what kind of interactions it can ignite on self-motivated spectators.

Four of the vases – the ones on upper-right corner of the video stream – are trying to grow Chili seeds, since yesterday. I read that it is hard to do it, with temperatures below 30. The temperature in the room where the plants are, is below that, so there is a high chance of failure. It is very probable that nothing will happen for many days.

The plants are on artificial light for ~8 hours/day. The rest of the time, they live with whatever ambient light the room gets, which can be very irregular. When the room gets dark enough, the plants will remain visible with infrared lighting.
In an effort to have something on camera, due to the difficulty in growing Chili, I have also planted Dill and Mint.

Enjoy, if you can.

One video of mine was blocked by YouTube

For the first time, one video of mine was “Blocked” by YouTube.

It was my first video from the game “Formula 1 2019”, where I race a lap in a Formula 2 car. The video has two parts: in the first part, I captured game footage from the game’s “TV” camera; in the second part, the footage is from an in-car camera that gives the “halo” perspective. It is the second part of the video that YouTube’s automated “Content ID” system flags and blocks.

My pragmatic solution: I edited the video without the second part (except for the first few seconds, for those interested in understanding what that second part was).

More here:

https://arturmarques.com/wp/2019/08/12/f1-2019-racing-the-formula-2-car-spain-0131919-lap-top-400/

From Heroes to Zeroes: a pair of Reolink C1 PRO cameras

On 2019-07-17, I ordered a Reolink C1 PRO IP camera, which would be delivered on 2019-07-22. On the same day, hours after having arrived, I configured and installed the camera. It worked fine until 2019-08-03, when it stopped working during the night. In the next morning, I found it stuck in a step of its PTZ program (Pan, Tilt, Zoom), unable to proceed to the next point.
Now, it just reboots itself, but it never completes the boot sequence; it does not request an IP address from the router, and just restarts again in a matter of seconds. It is unusable. Resets do nothing.

I had no option: I requested a full refund and will be returning the item to the seller (Amazon). In other times, this would mean an instant money credit, but these days it is necessary to wait for the item to arrive back to Amazon and be “processed”, which for an international buyer can translate to one month of waiting. My view is that the quality of the “Amazon buying experience” has been declining.

The Reolink C1 PRO is a 1440p IP camera. It looks good on paper, it provides a high quality video feed, and it theoretically features functions such as SD Card and FTP recording. I only wanted reliability and a high quality image, and achieved so for a couple of weeks, using both the “iSpy” and the “Blue Iris” software solutions. The software does all the hard work: it detects motion, it records video, it captures time-lapse snapshots, and it can programmatically send PTZ commands, so the camera can “patrol” an area. It is crucial that the software does the recording, because this Reolink model, contrary to others I own (models 410 and 411), was never able to record to the SD Card, nor able to upload files to a FTP server. I decided to accept these unexpected limitations because my approach is software-centered and the image quality was very good.

After one week of running the C1 PRO, happy with its image quality, I ordered a second identical camera. As I write, this second camera is still working, but I will also be returning it. The problem this time, is the number (and intensity) of bad pixels. The bad pixels are too many and too obvious. This is very surprising and frustrating. The reason I had confidently acquired a pair of C1 PROs, is the robust functioning, for 2+ years, of my outdoors IP cameras, of the same brand.

Now, with two consecutive unfortunate Reolink experiences, my confidence on Reolink is shaken.

Here is what is NOT explicitly written in the manuals, nor in the reviews (“commercials”?) I have read so far, about all my Reolink cameras (models 410, 411 and C1 PRO):

  • These cameras provide two video streams, usually named “clear” and “fluent”. The streams can be configured to an extent, but “clear” is the high resolution, high bandwidth stream; while “fluent” is the low resolution, lower quality version. Assuming the camera’s sensor comes with no dead pixels, the image quality can be very high when encoded at the highest possible bitrate, but in order to achieve a stable network resource, with no stream interruptions/loss of signal, it will be necessary to configure the camera’s “clear” video to a frame rate of no more than 4 fps.
  • I also find it helpful to encode with the “H264 baseline profile” and not with the “high profile”, because the latter demands more from the camera’s CPU (it provides higher compression, at the cost of extra processing time). The encoder settings are fundamental to those wanting the maximum quality combined with a stable network operation; neglect them and the camera will occasionally drop the connection.
  • On the C1 PRO, it is not possible to turn off the WiFi. I always connect via cable, and would appreciate an option to completely disable the WiFi radio. Such option does not exist.

So, a bad day for my pocket and cameras system.