About the Video Feed

As well as common garden birds, Red squirrels also eat from the feeder. They love those peanuts!

The camera has also caught mice that have climbed the tree to get to the free food, and even a Pine marten.

The squirrels come and go during daylight hours, although they seem to favour the morning, particularly the first few hours after sunrise. They are shy creatures when they first start visiting the garden and will run up the nearest tall tree and hide if I am moving around outside. As time passes most will tolerate my presence just so long as I am not too noisy or get too close. Some become very bold, allowing me to approach within a few metres while they are eating.

Working-out how to stream the video to a website was both a personal challenge and work-related project. Aside from being interested in such things, I wanted to show the video on my business webpage (timlucasforestmanagement.co.uk) as a means of generating some extra traffic. I have not finished that task yet, hence the video is still being shown here…

Brief technical overview

For anyone interested in the method used to serve the video feed, the video source is a cheap POE IP-cam that sends an RTSP stream to a local Debian Linux server. The server uses ffmpeg to receive the RTSP stream and convert it to an RTMP stream, after which ffmpeg forwards it to a WAN-side virtual private server (VPS). The VPS receives the RTMP stream and uses Nginx to convert it to HLS files, which are then served to the website visitor using an HLS plugin embedded on a WordPress page. After a little tweaking, it works faultlessly and with fairly meagre resources used.

Rather than stream a black screen at night, the ffmpeg script switches to displaying a static image around 30 minutes before sunset. As dawn approaches, the reverse happens and the video feed starts being streamed again. This is not a perfect solution, as it can still be very light here long after the official sunset time here in the summer. Also, it can still be quite dark after ‘sunrise’ in the late autumn and winter months, so the camera feed goes live when it is still too dark to see anything.