'A fluke': The oldest webcam is still watching over San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

'A fluke': The oldest webcam is still watching over San Francisco

sfgate.com

131 pointsStratoscope54 comments

Link to the FogCam website: https://fogcam.org/

Maybe it's just me but I couldn't find the direct link in the article except in one caption field and a few invisible credit fields.

It's not the oldest webcam, it's a modern webcam... it's an old webcam site that is still generating images. Interesting, of course, but it would be more interesting if it was still an old Connectix attached to an ancient Macintosh.

It's a Ship of Theseus argument. What is a "webcam"? The camera itself? Its location? The software running on the host computer? The web page it is streaming to?

You can replace each of the pieces slowly over time, but in the viewer's eye it is still the same.

I kind of hate that the term webcam now generally refers to a USB camera (that is almost exclusively used for zoom). Makes searching for the old-style web cams (i.e. publicly viewable web streaming cameras) much more difficult (and searching for 'live stream' or 'live cam' is fraught in its own way)

Oh man, this comment dredged up some deep memories for me. When I first got on the internet in the mid-90s (‘94 maybe?), one of the first web pages I remember finding was the “Peeping Tom Homepage” - a list of webcams available at the time maintained by a computer club at a university in Sweden.

I attribute the slightly salacious site title to either irony or a less-than-perfectly-idiomatic command of English, since all the linked sites were completely innocent scenes like this.

I spent a lot of time looking at pictures from around the world. Needless to say, I miss that internet a lot.

I was almost there and I think it could have been the very idea of spying on people anywhere was kind of scandalous. It's not what anyone would expect in public. (There was CCTV of course but the expectation was that it would be on a dusty VHS tape on a shelf somewhere.)

Rather like Trigger's Broom[1]

[1] https://www.adambowie.com/blog/2018/06/triggers-broom/

Nice point. I like how the author tries to hand wave away:

> held up by a couple of pieces of blue gaffer tape.

Gaffer tape is fairly expensive, more expensive than Gorilla tape of the same width and length. At times, gaffer tape is worth its volume in dimes. That isn't a cheap fix nor is it a good fix. Gaffer tape has a purpose and that isn't it (unless for some reason it needed to be disassembled often). Duct tape would have been a better fix and probably cost a sixth as much, but would have been permanent unless leaving adhesive all over it doesn't count as totaled.

If this comment isn't satire, I weep for the world. Any kind of adhesive tape is statistically going to be much cheaper than a damn tripod, let alone whatever alternative structure might be under consideration to affix the device to the window. Gaffer tape does indeed have a purpose: whatever the hell the user is trying to accomplish. It's not an orbital launch platform.

just for the record, in the photo the camera is supported by a tripod. perhaps the tape keeps it steadier.

They did say the only times it needs physically checked up on is when the tripod gets knocked over. Maybe they need to use name-brand gaffa tape instead of deliberalely-not-that-sticky blue masking tape.

I think the author mistook gaffer tape for painter's tape.

Maybe, but I think the implied reason for the detail was to suggest it was a precarious and cheap fix. But inch for inch, it really wasn't all that cheap.

edit: I think you're absolutely right.

painter's "masking tape"

fun fact: at the current time afaik you can get the whole rainbow of colors of masking tape in NYC, but LA seems to only have blue and neutral/tan

I imagine someone who knows what gaff tape is wouldn't mistake it for masking tape.

From their site:

> We've slightly changed campus locations a few times as necessary over the years, to prevent being shut down by the university.

Gaffer tape doesn't leave residue (or very little that's easy to remove), so I can imagine "not damaging the building" (making marks on the glass) being a condition of it staying up.

Different brands vary, but IME this is only correct for a few weeks at best. Otherwise you'll get a lot of residue, and if it's been outside exposed to UV you'll get even more. And duck tape is worse.

The thing is, the glue on masking tape becomes impossible to remove if it gets damp, at all, which is why it's dangerous leaving stuff masked up overnight.

Hence webcam vs. webcam site.

Well, it was cam vs webcam. Like we don't call all diaries blogs, just the web logs.

Ahh... memories of old webcams.

In the student lab I hung out in, there was a Mac IIcsomething and somehow it got a video capture card and a video camera. The video capture app was left running on the system (in the startup items too) and would capture once every so often (lets say about a minute). But, by itself, this wasn't enough. So it also ran an ftp server. We then had another system with a cron job and ftp the file to the unix system hosting the web server.

Looking it up...

https://web.archive.org/web/19990221185541/http://upl.cs.wis...

Definitely not the earliest webcam either - the article itself mentions the Trojan Room coffee pot cam at Cambridge University, UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

Oldest continuously operating webcam.

"The oldest continuously operating webcam is still operating" is tautological, no?

the oldest continuously operating webcam might have ceased operating, and the current longest continuously operating webcam may not have been operating anywhere near as long as the previous one had been continuously.

something similar happens when the oldest living human dies... if they were exceptionally long lived, there's a good chance the next in line is not, so it can be a big jump down in age

OTOH the article does not mention The Amazing Fishcam, which may predate the FogCam. The Amazing Fishcam was available at the URL about:fishcam in Netscape.

https://sites.google.com/a/montulli.org/about-fishcam/Home/h...

Yeah that webcam looks too new tech to be from 1994. That kind of device made for clipping to a laptop is mid-2000's tech. Early webcams were round or square and came on their own stand. More importantly, USB 1.0 was only standardized in 1996... so originally it must have been a serial or parallel port peripheral that may or may not have needed a separate digitizer, and it was almost certainly black-and-white. Maybe it was the Connectix QuickCam.

The reporter seems entirely too young to know how to capture how archaic the thing really was.

It's clearly stated in the article that this is not the original webcam.

> Historically, the first webcam actually predated the web.

Contradiction? Maybe they meant that the first internet cam predated the web?

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot has more details. So the Trojan Room coffee pot cam began its life as a local network cam which then went on to become the first web cam. So no contradiction there! Interesting bit of history!

We used to have a program `xcoffee`. You ran it and it displayed the latest image in a window.

What process should I follow if I want to stream a normal webcam to the web using my own webserver? I would like to just query the webcam and post it on the site without outside streaming like youtube or twitch.

It's super easy to do this. You can hook ffmpeg to capture webcam and send that into nginx. Then, nginx will natively run HLS to stream the video over the web.

I do something similar and run nginx in a docker container, so all I need to do is 1) run a docker container and 2) run ffmpeg elsewhere to send an input stream to the docker container. There are tutorials all over the web for doing this. Try searching for "ffmpeg nginx rtmp hls docker" without quotes.

This is a script I used to do this with just VLC as the server AND the client.

There should be a way to get it working from a browser, but it serves as a possible inspiration that runs well without having to install the kitchen sink to get it working.

The DEVICE_NUMBER may need to be changed (e.g, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.)

#!/bin/bash

# to view the stream, open with VLC: http://your-ip:8088/

if [ "$1" != ""]; then DEVICE_NUMBER=$1 else DEVICE_NUMBER=4 fi

    cvlc -vvv v4l2:///dev/video$DEVICE_NUMBER --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mjpg,acodec=none}:std{access=http,mux=mpjpeg,dst=0.0.0.0:8888}'

If you want a very low FPS stream you can do what @paxys mentioned and just take stills from the camera and serve them in an HTML page and refresh as often as you like. Let the user refresh the page, or use javascript to do it automatically.

If you want more of a "proper" video stream (whatever that means) one good choice is to use Icecast[1][2]. It makes it pretty easy to set up audio and video streams and publish them.

[1]: https://icecast.org/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icecast

Or even without JavaScript: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh

Heh, you're right of course. Can't believe I forgot about that. Even I've fallen into the rut of only thinking of Javascript for any kind of interactivity on the Web. Uggghhh.

There are tons of libraries and commands (e.g. ffmpeg) that will save a still frame from a camera input. Build a web page around that using whatever stack you like.

OBS Studio is supposed to do streaming from a PC's webcam in Windows or Linux, somewhat similar to how an actual netcam streams but the netcam doesn't need a PC & software to do the streaming.

With a netcam the PC is only needed to set up the netcam, then the netcam streams by itself, connected directly to your network, the PC can then be turned off.

Either way you would be opening a port on your firewalls/routers to match the one you select for your camserver-PC (or netcam), for viewers to access the cam at yourIPaddress:port by using a media player like VLC or even the old Windows Media Player, which accepts a specific port for streaming media from a numerical or named IP address.

Basically you use the "port forwarding" features of your router to allow the internet WAN to connect to your private LAN through that one specific port only, where the camera stream is present. This is considered a "pinhole" in your firewall.

The viewing user does need to use a media player that has the proper codecs installed to play the format that your particular cam is sending. With encoding software like OBS you can choose to stream other formats besides the native cam output if you want.

I've used an rtsp sever [1] along with hls.js [2] so that I can have it in a nicer webpage and then stuck it all behind a vpn (wireguard).

[1]: https://github.com/aler9/rtsp-simple-server [2]: https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/

one solution that might work for you and may approach some definition of simplicity would be ffmpeg + caddy + videojs.

basically use ffmpeg to make an m3u8. use caddy to serve the video files and the html/js. videojs will rebox the m3u8 for your friends using chrome/android.

On a network camera like an Axis you can just curl down a frame.

no need for a webserver. just buy a network enabled camera. they are like $20

Spoiler, It’s a new webcam.

I was hoping to see what a .1 megapixel digital camera looks like.

https://640by480.com/

But worse, because cameras back then had horrible shot noise and used horrible JPEG compression.

I don't understand how this is a fluke. Is this some weird American way to use the word?

A fluke would be an unusual example of something. It's pretty unusual for a webcam to be online for 28 years.

No, a fluke is a lucky event that you are unable to reproduce. This could totally be reproduced and, in fact, was done deliberately.

A fluke would be me, an unskilled player, throwing a basketball and getting a lucky hoop. But getting a basketball through the hoop is not an unusual example of anything.

OK, you've just reminded me of one of my favourite stories. In Alien Resurrection, there's a scene where "Ripley" throws a basket ball behind her and it goes straight in the hoop. Now, obviously, you only need one take, but still Sigourney Weaver needed to practice. And practice she did, getting it so that she could reliably do it from a fixed spot in ten or so tries. Then she gets there and the set and marks are _much_ bigger than she was expecting. Like, four times as far.

They discuss this, realize there's absolutely no chance of this working, so just agree that she'll throw it, and they'll cut to the ball going in. So she goes and takes the shot and... the ball goes in the basket.

There's video of this online that includes the cheers from everyone in the crew who saw it happen. Just don't ask her to do it again.

Someone should really put a webcam on the oldest continuously running lightbulb. The one that's been in that one firehouse since the early 1900s.

I don’t know if you are being tongue in cheek here, but in case you aren’t: It’s been done!

https://www.centennialbulb.org

This site (sfgate) is very difficult to use on mobile. Ads cover most of the screen and it messes up the back button history.

this webcam went through a near-death-experience in 2019 :

The Longest Running Web Cam, Set to Go Offline, Has Been Saved

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/longest-running-we...

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