Topic: So...WeatherUnderground is discontinuing webcams Dec 15 - options?

[Aardvark]

I have given up on WU for now, as far as webcams.  I took advice and went with webcam.io. yeah it costs, but it works for now.     I am going to try to get both of my Bloomsky cameras back on line, but right now  neither is active on my page. I am in no big rush.

[WeatherNC]

Hey Guys, I'm using FTP.  Its working great.  As a matter of fact I'm sending two cameras.  I asked WU tech William about sending via URL.  Here is the reply.
So, give it a day or two.
John

To change to URL, go to https://www.wunderground.com/webcams/signup.html and click "edit" next to an existing cam.

Usually, approval is within a day or so.

Thank you,
William
Wunderground Support

[KD8DWO]

Web cams are still working here.

KD8DWO

KOHBOWLI4 wunderground station.

Davis weather monitor II.

WHHU software.

Win 10 host.

12/17/2017
12/17/2017

[Mark Spencer]

We Heard You and Webcams are Here to Stay!   View in Browser
Weather Underground
 
I got this email from WU on December 11th :

To our webcam community members:

We heard from many of you about how much you like and rely on our webcam product. So we will not discontinue the product as we stated in November. We will continue to allow users to add webcams to the Weather Underground network and everyone can view images from connected webcams.

Thank you for your passionate support and apologies for any inconvenience we caused.


The WU Team

[WeatherNC]

Well,  I've been struggling all day trying to get my cams to upload on time.  I was uploading two but one of them just stopped uploading.  They are so inconsistent.  I'm only uploading one right now via FTP.  I have it set to every 5 mins.  It could go from 10 mins to 45 mins.  Driving me nuts.  Anyone else having this problem?  I;m wondering if I should delete my weather station and start over.  Or, is it thier servers still screwing up.  I'm looking at other cams and they are doing fine.  a few are out 45 mins or so.  Advice?!

John

[antstrafer]

My cam is set to 5 min.   I get upload times from 5 min to 45-50 minutes.   Wu has left the cams on, they don't seem to do much more than that.
Maybe as time goes on, they will gear up to take care of the cams and software issues.  In the meantime DHYB.   

[Central Maine Weather]

Well,  I've been struggling all day trying to get my cams to upload on time.  I was uploading two but one of them just stopped uploading.  They are so inconsistent.  I'm only uploading one right now via FTP.  I have it set to every 5 mins.  It could go from 10 mins to 45 mins.  Driving me nuts.  Anyone else having this problem?  I;m wondering if I should delete my weather station and start over.  Or, is it thier servers still screwing up.  I'm looking at other cams and they are doing fine.  a few are out 45 mins or so.  Advice?!

John

I wouldn't do anything yet. Give it a bit more time, although time may not make much of a difference either. I used to use the FTP method which seemed to be very reliable, and it updated pretty regularly at my set interval of every 5 minutes, but when WU had their major server issues late this past summer, I switched over the the URL upload method, which worked, but they are very inconsistent with their timing on grabbing the images. I have it set to once every 5 minutes, but rarely does it actually update every 5 minutes. Sometimes it's 10, sometimes 30, sometimes almost an hour.

So like I said, I wouldn't worry too much about it just yet. It is definitely annoying, but it's not an issue on your end. Still a WU server issue.

    - Matt

[WeatherNC]

Whew!  Thanks for the reply’s.  Glad I’m not alone.  I considered switcing to URL method but was not sure how to do it.  Are you using the url directly from your camera or a web site?

Thanks again guys, I hope they get things fixed.  Used to be nice when all worked as designed.

John

[Central Maine Weather]

Are you using the url directly from your camera or a web site?

John

I have my webcam software send an image to my website directly, and I have Weather Underground grab the image from that website page. At one point I did have WU grab the webcam image URL directly and that did work just fine too. Now it's just as easy (and more reliable) to send the image directly to my website, and just have Weather Underground grab that image when it's convenient for them. At least I know the image on my website is being updated reliably once every 30 seconds, because as we've learned, I can't say the same for the same webcam image on my WU page.

[WeatherNC]

Sounds like a great way to do it.  Wish I knew how to set that up.

Thanks

[Central Maine Weather]

What webcam software do you use to send your webcam image to WU currently? It's usually as simple as going into that software program and getting your URL code, and then going into your webcams on your weather underground page and editing your current webcam from FTP to URL. For example, I use YAWCAM software, and in that software there is a tab that gives me my webcam URL, both a still image URL and a live streaming URL. Obviously for WU reasons you need to use the static image URL. Follow the setup directions on that WU page and then they will have to 're-approve' the image, and you should be good to go thereafter.
    - Matt

[WeatherNC]

I use the software in the camera.  It's pretty sweet.  The camera is like a stand alone server.  You can send FTP from it.  I can grab the URL and use it from the cam, I'll give that a try.  Yawcam is nice, but I don't want to leave my computer running.

Thanks for the advice and support.

Lets hope things get better with WU.
John

[Central Maine Weather]

Very cool, and I don’t blame you there! We sure can hope!

[WeatherNC]

Hey,

Question for you;  Where did you find the rapid fire widget you have on your website.  Cant seem to locate mine on the WU weather station.  I know I've seen it before but I cant seem to locate it.

John

[Central Maine Weather]

I lost track of where I found it because it's been a few years since I've needed to edit that part, but I did end up saving the HTML Code...

<object width="600" height="400"><param name="movie" value="http://www.wunderground.com/swf/Rapid_Fire.swf?units=english&station=KMELEEDS7"/><embed src="http://www.wunderground.com/swf/Rapid_Fire.swf?units=english&station=KMELEEDS7" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="600" height="400"/></object>

Just change the couple places where it says KMELEEDS7 to your Weather Underground Station ID and you should be good to go. And if you want metric and English values displayed, just change the two places where it says "english" to either "metric" for just metric, or "both" for both english and metric values.
   - Matt

[WeatherNC]

Great!  Thank you..

John

[Central Maine Weather]

Absolutely!

[eliteweathernz]

Guys Weather Underground has retracted there move to remove the support for webcams so some good news for you all

[Central Maine Weather]

Guys Weather Underground has retracted there move to remove the support for webcams so some good news for you all

We knew this was the case but thanks anyways for the heads up. What we're saying is that even though they've opted to continue allowing webcam images to be displayed on their site, their direct support to webcam issues will be minimal to almost non-existent, and the functionality of the servers they use to host the webcam images is poor at best. But, it does work from time to time, and I guess if we go into it expecting there to be issues, we can't get too disappointed. It is after all a pretty neat feature that was rather unique to WU for a while.
   - Matt