Apologies for the occasional camera hangs. Just to recap, both cameras run through the same streaming server computer. What we used to find was that if a hang happened, for whatever shady reason, we’d lose the streams until someone could get into campus and reboot the server. To solve any medium and short-term issues we have fully automated the streams to restart every hour and the streaming server itself to reboot once every day, which resets all streams and input. If you’re watching at that time things will stop. After a minute or so you should be able to refresh the pages and get the live vision back. The other possibility is that campus suffers yet another inconvenient power outage, which would be out of our control. Both the servers and the cameras will restart automatically on power-up. I hope this answers the few irregularities.
An idea that’s been proffered in the past couple of days is to run a discussion forum of sorts, tied in with FalconCam Project. It’s a great idea and would provide proactive participation for everyone, as events happen. We’ll look into this as soon as practical; top of the list (behind HTML5 camera streams!). Thanks to everyone for the ideas. Keep them coming. It’s become a real daytime drama up in the “Concrete Hilton”…
Hi Scott, thank you for taking the trouble to explain the ins ‘n outs, ups ‘n downs of the cam streams.
At the moment I’m trying to screen-capture the nestcam 24/7 but can only do one of the cams at a time – insufficient resources for more, and even then I’m having to use a weak netbook. I have an auto-refresh browser add-on set to half-hourly.
Most streams I can download, no screens required, but these streams will not download and I wondered if anything can be done about that. I download several nestcams in the background while beavering away editing/posting/whatever, and the resulting recordings are comparatively easy to navigate to extract “events”. And the thoughtfully embedded timeline means we don’t lose our place 😉
I missed the suggestion re a discussion forum but coincidentally had been mulling over how we could have a forum where pictures and videos could be displayed on the page rather than as “soulless” links. Obviously that would be a heavy burden for FalconCamProject.org to bear.
Thanks for everything!