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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

Anybody have a suggestion for good outdoor cameras, ideally that can be powered by solar, for similar application? I've been looking for cameras for something similar, but every one I review is either not weather proof or requires some kind of mobile app IE: intended for security camera type use. I've got a use case where I want to be able to stream particular outdoor videos to an audience without requiring a lot of account setup or client-side requirements.

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Look at outdoor cameras targeted at the commercial market, e.g. from Hikvision and similar brands. Solar is probably out of the question due to power requirements, but if you can run one Ethernet cable, there's a lot of cameras available that run from PoE and stream over RTSP, which can be proxied to YouTube (or AWS, etc) without much trouble.

Cost will be considerably higher than for IoT residential junk, however.

I worked on a project powering Hikvision cameras over solar and a big battery, I don't know the specs of the panel but I know it can be done.

It's using IPTimelapse to grab photos and generate time-lapses (however we've found the software to be buggy, and we're gonna move to ffmpeg for time-lapses and probably a small script to grab photos).

The website is fully staticly generated which I was happy with.

See: https://cmcameras.net.au

I wouldn't support Hikvision, but there are a number of good options from Axis, Hanwha, Vivotek, and others. They are all generally 7W or less, so solar compatible in most locations.

Look for cameras rated IP66 or IP67 and you should have something that will stand up in typical outdoor locations.

How do people feel about ubiquiti cameras? Just curious.

Hikvision cameras are good, however they encode video in their own proprietary format (at least when I last checked) so you will have difficulties streaming them to anything that is not their make.

I've used ffmpeg to convert from that format. If your CPU is fast enough it could probably handle re-encoding just in time for streaming (there are cli flags to do that).

Yeah, I have done that as well, but so far could find a way to live stream it

They use ordinary h264, the wonky encoding is the proprietary storage container format. For streaming you can just use bog standard RTSP.

Interesting. I am no way an expert in video encoding, but is there a way to get it streamed to the browser? I have a bunch of hikvisions but so far I am using it either through their Android app, or an ancient Firefox plugin.

I've got Hikvision cameras that I use with OrchidVMS I can pull out the camera RTSP stream with a direct URL like: rtsp://[cameraIP]/Streaming/Channels/101?transportmode=unicast&profile=Profile_1

which will open directly in VLC with a login to the camera

I've used some cameras and streaming setups to pull in the video stream directly, Samsung ones did this quite well.

If it provides an RTSP stream, you should be able to just log into it via a browser, either using the ip directly or putting rtsp:// in front. I'm using Amcrest cameras at home, seems like a lot of models work similarly.

Look into Ubiquiti. I use their UniFi line of products from networking to security cameras in 2 places and I’m very very pleased. Everything runs on PoE. They also sell some solar accessories called SunMAX.

Most of their products require a phone to set them up. My father in law has an AP I setup once 2 years ago and never needed the mobile app again.

You might consider making your own with an IP67+ box. I've done that for weatherproofing projects for electronics. (a long time ago the first design was for gps tracking old tractors)

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