Author Topic: Webcam🤔  (Read 970 times)

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Offline Jjm457

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Webcam🤔
« on: October 30, 2018, 08:10:55 PM »
How has everybody's webcam been lately... Mine is not updating on a regular basis it's acting strange!

Offline jackman

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    • Echo Pines WX Station
Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #1 on: October 30, 2018, 08:28:19 PM »
Mine's been working great for at least a month now. There's been problems in the past but WU seems to have fixed it including the archives and videos.

Offline Jjm457

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« Last Edit: October 30, 2018, 10:27:48 PM by Jjm457 »

Offline ANPweather

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    • Anthem North Parkside, AZ
Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #3 on: October 31, 2018, 12:34:22 PM »
Whenever I check, the webcam image is current. But, the videos created are horrible. Either a "video" of one or two or three images from the 24 hour period or, more often than not, I get a stream error for that day.

Davis Vantage Vue, Davis Pro 2 Console with Wifi Logger
Weather Display software
WU: KAZNEWRI17
PWS: ANTHEMNP
CWOP: EW7526

Offline quailvalleywx

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Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #4 on: November 01, 2018, 10:08:14 AM »
Is the webcam using the FTP upload method rather than URL?  If FTP then one of WU's FTP servers has been down since Oct 25 (http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=35402.0).  Since Oct 25th, on average every one in three uploads are failing since we randomly get assigned one of the three servers, working or not.  Last night from looking at my webcam log file I had worse case 4 attempts in a row fail trying to send to that down server.  If your webcam updates every 5 minutes that would mean no updates for 20 minutes then in 25 minutes it would work.  Most of the time my webcam hit the two working servers and it worked fine.

The majority of last ~year all three FTP servers have been running but in the last 2 - 3 months one of the three have been down fairly often.  WU also had a problem getting images from the FTP servers to the station page webcam tab and wundermap but that was fixed months ago.  The process that grabs images and makes the videos is pretty messed up at the moment.

Mike.
WS-1400-IP, Galaxy S3 for cloud cam and Web Server
QV Website | Source Code | WU | WC | PWS | MesoWest/CWOP

Offline ANPweather

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    • Anthem North Parkside, AZ
Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #5 on: November 01, 2018, 01:54:23 PM »
Nope, I'm using the following URL. A new image is generated every 10 minutes.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/y6b91p5dhzk8dvy/arlosnapshot.gif?raw=1
« Last Edit: November 01, 2018, 01:55:57 PM by ANPweather »

Davis Vantage Vue, Davis Pro 2 Console with Wifi Logger
Weather Display software
WU: KAZNEWRI17
PWS: ANTHEMNP
CWOP: EW7526

Offline Central Maine Weather

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Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #6 on: November 01, 2018, 02:11:04 PM »
My cam generates a new image to this page once every minute...

https://assets1.webcam.io/w/MmB5V9/latest.jpg. You just have to manually refresh the browser to get the newest image.

I also use the URL method to upload to Weather Underground, and on my Weather Underground page the image usually only updates once every 1-2 hours or so. It’s pretty horrible. I used to use the FTP method but that wasn’t much different. Now I just FTP to my page

http://monumenthillweather.webs.com

And then let WU grab the image from the above URL whenever they do. I would like it to be more regularly but know that’s not going to happen anytime soon, which is why I reliably FTP a new image to my website once every minute. But hey, at least it’s somewhat working now better than a few months ago.

   - Matt
Central Maine Weather | Manchester, ME, USA
Davis Vantage Pro2 w/24hr FARS & WeatherLink Live
CWOP ID GW1328
CoCoRAHS ID ME-KB-55
My YouTube Channel = https://www.youtube.com/@OffTrailMaine

Offline WonderWX

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Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #7 on: November 02, 2018, 11:33:13 AM »
My cam generates a new image to this page once every minute...

https://assets1.webcam.io/w/MmB5V9/latest.jpg. You just have to manually refresh the browser to get the newest image.

I also use the URL method to upload to Weather Underground, and on my Weather Underground page the image usually only updates once every 1-2 hours or so. It’s pretty horrible. I used to use the FTP method but that wasn’t much different. Now I just FTP to my page

http://monumenthillweather.webs.com

And then let WU grab the image from the above URL whenever they do. I would like it to be more regularly but know that’s not going to happen anytime soon, which is why I reliably FTP a new image to my website once every minute. But hey, at least it’s somewhat working now better than a few months ago.

   - Matt

your image file size is too big. currently 389.05 KB (398,390 bytes)

Offline Central Maine Weather

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Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #8 on: November 02, 2018, 05:45:32 PM »
your image file size is too big. currently 389.05 KB (398,390 bytes)
The only problem is I have no idea how to make it smaller. That’s just the image that the cam automatically generates. The only thing I can think of is reducing the resolution, but I don’t want to do that and sacrifice the quality of the image that is automatically FTP’d to my personal website which does update each minute. And I can only get the cam to work with it’s own software and Webcam.io

   - Matt
Central Maine Weather | Manchester, ME, USA
Davis Vantage Pro2 w/24hr FARS & WeatherLink Live
CWOP ID GW1328
CoCoRAHS ID ME-KB-55
My YouTube Channel = https://www.youtube.com/@OffTrailMaine

Offline WonderWX

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Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #9 on: November 02, 2018, 06:09:10 PM »
To get under the 150KB limit you'll need to process your image somehow before uploading to WU. It is possible to keep your same resolution but make the filesize smaller using freely available tools.

Offline Central Maine Weather

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Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #10 on: November 02, 2018, 06:11:03 PM »
To get under the 150KB limit you'll need to process your image somehow before uploading to WU. It is possible to keep your same resolution but make the filesize smaller using freely available tools.
Sounds like a great idea and definitely something I would love to look into. I'll do some research, but at the same time do you know of any possible available tools? Thanks!
   - Matt
Central Maine Weather | Manchester, ME, USA
Davis Vantage Pro2 w/24hr FARS & WeatherLink Live
CWOP ID GW1328
CoCoRAHS ID ME-KB-55
My YouTube Channel = https://www.youtube.com/@OffTrailMaine

Offline WonderWX

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Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #11 on: November 03, 2018, 07:36:28 AM »
One way is ImageMagick - packages available for most linux/unix,  cygwin on Windows, Homebrew on Mac. Using the convert utility from ImageMagick:
convert -quality 70 latest_hd.jpg smaller.jpg

latest_hd.jpg was 281 KB,  'smaller.jpg' file is 125 KB   with not much noticeable loss of quality and same resolution.

you could use the program curl, also widely available on same platforms, to retrieve the image from the camera, run the convert tool, then use curl to upload to WU.  All scriptable to run at set interval.


Offline Central Maine Weather

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Re: Webcam🤔
« Reply #12 on: November 03, 2018, 05:55:04 PM »
Nice! Thanks for the info!

   - Matt
Central Maine Weather | Manchester, ME, USA
Davis Vantage Pro2 w/24hr FARS & WeatherLink Live
CWOP ID GW1328
CoCoRAHS ID ME-KB-55
My YouTube Channel = https://www.youtube.com/@OffTrailMaine