Over the last few years I’ve been gathering more and more equipment which supports Power over Ethernet such a access-points and the IP camera’s I’ve written about before. I need something to power those POE devices! Most managable POE switches are quite expensive so I’ve been looking around for cheaper options and decided to order a “dumb” POE+ switch from China to test!
A while back I built myself a powerful PC based HTPC and today a friend asked me to design one for him. Since I have it all figured out anyway, I can just as well put it up on here.
After creating a timelapse method using FFmpeg and after that using VLC a new method was discovered by one of my commentators. He dissected the firmware files and found that you can access an URL which then gives you a picture. This of course is the ideal way of generating pictures with a set time interval and I’ll walk you through the process in this post.
Someone made a comment on my original post about the 5Mpix TI DaVinci DM368 DSP camera that tpsee (the internal board manufacturer) has released firmware 2.5.0.0 for our cameras. I believe that to be worthy to open a new topic for!
If you have seen some demo clips I have recorded over the last few blog posts you would have seen I use my bunnies as ‘test subjects’. Today, they retaliated…
For a while now I have been writing about the TI DaVinci DM368 DSP based cameras. And while these chinese cameras work very well in most situations, they always come with only a small amount of cable in which you need to plug your UTP and power cable. And while the camera might be weatherproof, this connection certainly isn’t. I have a cheap solution which I use for this, read on inside!
It’s been a while since my original posting about the IP Camera I had acquired with the TI DaVinci DM368 DSP. Since then, that article has been expanded quite a bit with more firmware levels, and I wrote some other articles on how to make a timelapse. I have since aquired 6 more camera’s with the same chipset, all in different forms and configurations, read more about those and where you can buy them in this article.
Having written the previous article on how to do this with FFMPEG I have become painfully aware of the limitations FFMPEG posses in the RTSP department. I was unable to reliably get a non-corrupted output from it. Thus I looked onward for another tool to do this for me, I ended up with VLC and I wrote a new script for it.
The IP cameras I own do not have the HTTP picture URL ability some do. But I still want to use them to create timelapse videos. So I devised a way to do this using a cameras RTSP stream with FFMPEG. update– Since writing this I have determined this method will always produce corrupted JPG files with my 5Mpix IP camera. I have devised a new method using VLC which does not have these corruption problems. The described method below remains valid but please check your results and then decide which method to use.
Ever since I started with the IP camera’s described in my previous posts I’ve been plagued by a problem that the RTSP streams would sometimes show corruption in the lower/bottom part of the picture as shown below: