You had some questions:
"Haven't you considered to simply "livestream" both camera feeds to your website?"
Aside from the fact that I don’t know how to do that, the Internet configuration at that site is rather odd. The cameras are located on the balcony of a condo. All of the 300+ units in that condo complex share a single IP address and the bandwidth. I don’t want to be the bad guy whose streaming webcams that no one looks at causes everyone’s Netflix or YouTube to buffer all the time. Plus, we’re all behind a double NAT which complicates things.
"However I'm curious to know if you're using RTSP push or pull…"
• I don’t know enough about RTSP to know the difference. The cameras I’m testing with (Tapos from TP-LINK.) are constantly streaming via TP-LINK’s cloud so that they can be viewed using the Tapo app, or via RTSP with something like VLC.
• My plan is to not use TP-LINK’s cloud and just grab images once every two minutes via RTSP. I know that it takes time for cameras to initialize and stabilize so I’ll need to allow for that. With the USB cameras I use fswebcam to grab 50 frames and just save the last.
"Last question : why bookworm over trixie?"
Long story. When Bookworm was first announced I was amazed that you couldn’t upgrade in situ. I have four Pies running Buster and I just didn’t want to go through the hassle of upgrading all of them to Bookworm by starting over from scratch.
Eventually I decided to give it a try. I didn’t want to use an existing Pi so I bought a new one, put together an SSD for the boot drive, bought a cheap USB WebCam for testing and started to work. It turned out to be one of the most time consuming, difficult and frustrating projects I’d ever engaged in. I documented some of it here:
PI OS Upgrade: Buster to Bookworm [way too long to read.]
Looking back I find that thread to be enormously embarrassing as I made my frustration way too obvious. I was surprised to later learn that the thread had over a thousand views.
After a few weeks of misery I gave up, put the Pi, SSD and WebCam in a drawer and forgot all about it. My motto became, “Once a Buster, Always a Buster”.
A few weeks ago when I decided to consider ditching the two USB cameras and try RTSP instead. I figured I could use the Bookworm Pi to grab images from both streams and eliminate one Pi. (I have two Pies at the condo as the cameras are too far apart to plug both in to one Pi. USB extension cables just don’t work with cameras.) The Bookworm Pi will require lots of modifications as it was built to replace a Pi at my home which does quite a few different things from the Pies at the condo.
So, way more information than you asked for, but there it is.
"Haven't you considered to simply "livestream" both camera feeds to your website?"
Aside from the fact that I don’t know how to do that, the Internet configuration at that site is rather odd. The cameras are located on the balcony of a condo. All of the 300+ units in that condo complex share a single IP address and the bandwidth. I don’t want to be the bad guy whose streaming webcams that no one looks at causes everyone’s Netflix or YouTube to buffer all the time. Plus, we’re all behind a double NAT which complicates things.
"However I'm curious to know if you're using RTSP push or pull…"
• I don’t know enough about RTSP to know the difference. The cameras I’m testing with (Tapos from TP-LINK.) are constantly streaming via TP-LINK’s cloud so that they can be viewed using the Tapo app, or via RTSP with something like VLC.
• My plan is to not use TP-LINK’s cloud and just grab images once every two minutes via RTSP. I know that it takes time for cameras to initialize and stabilize so I’ll need to allow for that. With the USB cameras I use fswebcam to grab 50 frames and just save the last.
"Last question : why bookworm over trixie?"
Long story. When Bookworm was first announced I was amazed that you couldn’t upgrade in situ. I have four Pies running Buster and I just didn’t want to go through the hassle of upgrading all of them to Bookworm by starting over from scratch.
Eventually I decided to give it a try. I didn’t want to use an existing Pi so I bought a new one, put together an SSD for the boot drive, bought a cheap USB WebCam for testing and started to work. It turned out to be one of the most time consuming, difficult and frustrating projects I’d ever engaged in. I documented some of it here:
PI OS Upgrade: Buster to Bookworm [way too long to read.]
Looking back I find that thread to be enormously embarrassing as I made my frustration way too obvious. I was surprised to later learn that the thread had over a thousand views.
After a few weeks of misery I gave up, put the Pi, SSD and WebCam in a drawer and forgot all about it. My motto became, “Once a Buster, Always a Buster”.
A few weeks ago when I decided to consider ditching the two USB cameras and try RTSP instead. I figured I could use the Bookworm Pi to grab images from both streams and eliminate one Pi. (I have two Pies at the condo as the cameras are too far apart to plug both in to one Pi. USB extension cables just don’t work with cameras.) The Bookworm Pi will require lots of modifications as it was built to replace a Pi at my home which does quite a few different things from the Pies at the condo.
So, way more information than you asked for, but there it is.
Statistics: Posted by Ratsima — Thu Nov 06, 2025 1:55 am