I used to do a 24 hour timelapse very single day, Starting at midnight, ending at 11:53. I was using either a Foscam or a Reolink camera for the images.
It would take my machine about 1 minute 40 seconds to process nearly 6000 images in to a 2m 30s 1080p video. Each image would be between 40 and 70kb, depending on details during the day and night.
I decided I didn't want to keep my main machine on 24/7 any more, as it can consume 400 - 500W under load. Due to energy costs, I couldn't do it any longer.
I've since moved over to an 8MP / 4K Hikvision camera with brilliant low-light imagery, so I moved IPTimelapse over to my mini-pc, just to scrape an image every 60 seconds, and upload it to my server, so that I can provide all third-party weather sites with a decent webcam image. I also have the full 4K RTSP feed on my website.
Unfortunately, I will not being doing timelapse's with it, as each saved image is between 4 and 7MB in size. It would either take far too long to process on my mini-pc, or it would shutdown due to reaching the max TDP on the CPU for too long.
I think IPTimelapse uses ffmpeg to do the encoding, that's why it is CPU intense at anything over 720p.
I recently got a rollocking from my hosting company, as I uploaded several 4K videos to my Lychee gallery software. It used ffmpeg to encode it, and I later found out that it maxed out all of my resources and caused some issues for other users on the shared host. lol
Hi, thanks for the reply,
Thats the main reason i stopped using a PC for dedicated weather machine and started using a laptop, whilst things tend to be a tad slower, its only using max 54w and at minimum around 37w, its so much cheaper to run than my PC, in fact, the latter is sat in a corner somewhere, I've not used it for about 4 years now, even my video processing (Adobe Premiere) is all done on my main lappy.
I have since returned the Reolink, it kept flickering every 1 to 2 seconds at night, its as though the ISO couldn't figure out what it wanted to do. it was worse when pointed at the sky but hardly noticeable when pointed at the table thats a few feet from it and some what noticeable when pointed at the garden as a whole, therefore, the lower the light for the image the worse it got. You can see the issue below...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zx-iv45arU&ab_channel=BrecklandWeatherI think i also got the dreaded CPU issue too as a few times when i looked at the machine IPT had either stopped or shutdown, i think it was the former, i cant quite remember now, i could have lowered the settings more to try to get around that though if it wasn't for he night issue.
Thats one of the main issues with shared hosting, its the limited resources, youre pretty much fine as a standard website, anything over that and they try to upsell, thats one of the reasons i have used a dedicated server since 2007, while tits more expensive, i cant pretty much do what i want, i.e. upload every 3 seconds, no limits on upload sizes, I'm only limited by my HDD space. 2tb, server specs...
Specs Intel i5-750 - 16GB DDR3 1333 MHz - 2Tb SATA, i think its only on a 10/100mb connection but its only about £23 a month including unlimited accounts WHM cPanel, about £17 excluding unlimited WHM cPanel, although, it used to be (at the time) over $50 just for 100 accounts cPanel, for me, its well worth it.
As for the camera, i may try the 2k Tapo, the ws version is supposed to have a starlight sensor but doesn't have a zoom so i wouldnt be able to zoom in on the snow gauge or just stick with a rubbish indoor Tapo i already have and use an overly for the gauge measurements, it would be far less resources needed as the image size isn't anywhere near the Reolink that got shipped back. This is all under the assumption that we will even get any snow this year, when little we had for the last few years it wouldnt even register on the gauge lol
Anyhoo, thanks again for the reply