Last month I decided to improve the streaming software for the video feeds from my robots. Thus far I have been using Active WebCam which I’ve had good success, minus a few things. So I set out to find something else.
I decided to revisit YawCam which I had tested in the past but for one reason or another I decided against it. This time though, I decided to give it a try and see if it would work for my robots. YawCam has gone through some updates since I used it last. It is actively supported and used. Getting multiple webcams to work isn’t the cleanest solution with YawCam but it works. My main selling point is that I was able to stream video on a mobile web browser on both Android and iOS. The only issue was I couldn’t use my web server to do the streaming and therefore it wouldn’t be integrated with my web site security. The application has its own security which causes a double login. One for the site and another for each camera. Overall it was worth it since I am able to stream to mobile.
The way the application is setup is with three instances, one for each camera. The application server has support to run as a service in separate folders so each can have its own configuration. Unfortunately, I could not get the webcam and USB capture device drivers to work on my web server because of ESXi, so YawCam is running on my desktop PC.
Overall it works well and it is much easier than trying to write my own application from scratch, which I wouldn’t even know where to start. This year I plan to improve my programming skills, including Java and mobile development, so who knows down the road.