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How To Make An Advanced Wireless Video Baby Monitor
So, a while back, I wrote about making your own video baby monitor. This has worked very well, with one exception: at night. The webcam I used doesn’t cope very well at night, and since you are going to want to monitor your baby mostly at night, then I guess that is pretty fail. So, I got myself a new IP / Network webcam, this time a real cheapo Chinese joby from eBay. One of these:
Now, this camera actually isn’t half bad. It’s got 10 IR LEDs for night vision, it claims to be 10MP, but I am not so sure about that, however the picture quality is fine. It also has audio in and out. Now, sadly, the audio in is pretty terrible, very smothered and fuzzy. I think that is partly down to the low bit rate it uses, but also because the microphone is blocked by the bodywork, which I’ll try and fix one day. The cool thing is that it has pan and tilt built in, so you can move it around to get something in picture, so you haven’t got to get up to move the camera if your baby has moved around somewhere.
The only issue I came across, was getting a video feed WITH audio out of this thin on Linux. It offers an ActiveX solution for IE, but only a video feed for FireFox, without audio (the fact it offers any FireFox compatibility at all is pretty cool). Now, the webcam doesn’t advertise what it is, since it turns out it is a rip off a webcam made by Fosscam. It is actually a Netwave IP camera. This was my major hurdle in working out how to use it. After literally hours and hours or googling and posting on metafi I finally found out how to get an video stream with audio out of it. It turns out the solution is quite simple, you just use this address in VLC’s streaming media source input:
http://IPADDRESS:PORT/videostream.asf?user=admin&resolution=32
Of course, if you changed the username, change it here and if you have a password, then add &pwd=PASSWORD or whatever it is. I found this address from an awesome PDF that lists all the Fosscam’s cgi commands and since the Netwave is a ripoff of the Fosscam, it uses the same commands.
You can find the PDF here: http://www.drivehq.com/file/df.aspx/publish/bubbah/PublicFolder/IPCAMCGISDKV1.7.pdf
There are loads of other options, you can basically configure the whole camera through cgi calls, though, beware, you can mess up and lock yourself out of the camera if you don’t know what you are doing. Here are a snippet of some of the commands:
Take a photo: /snapshot.cgi[?user=&pwd=&next_url=] Parameters user:username pwd:password next_url:the name of snapshot
Use server push mode to send videostream (no audio) /videostream.cgi[?user=&pwd=&resolution=] Parameters user:username pwd:password Resolution:8:320*240 32:640*480
Send videostream in asf format, only support vlc player and mplayer (with audio): /videostream.asf[?user=&pwd=&resolution=] Parameters user:username pwd:password Resolution: 8:320*240 32:640*480
Get device status info: /get_status.cgi Parameters now:The count of seconds form 1970-1-1 0:0:0 to now alarm_status: 0:no alarm 1:motion alarm 2:input alarm ddns_status:DDNS status upnp_status:UPNP status
Get camera params: /get_camera_params.cgi[?user=&pwd=] Parameters user:username pwd:password Resolution: 8: 320*240 32: 640*480 Brightness: 0-255 Contrast: 0-6 Mode: 0: 50hz 1: 60hz 2 outdoor format Flip: 0: initial 1: vertical rotate 2: horizontal rotate 3: vertical + horizontal rotate
Set misc parameters of camera: /set_misc.cgi?[led_mode=&ptz_center_onstart=&ptz_auto_patrol_interval=&ptz_auto_patrol_type=&ptz_patrol_h_rounds=&ptz_patrol_v_rounds=&next_url=]
Parameters Led_mode: 0:mode1 1:model2 2:shut off the led Ptz_center_onstart: =1 Ptz_auto_patrol_interval, =0: no auto rotating Ptz_auto_patrol_type: 0:no rotate 1:horizontal 2: vertical 3: horizontal + vertical
I can also access the camera through it’s http interface or by using an Android app called IP Camera Lite, which allows me to pan and tilt the camera remotely.
Anyway, using this method, I now have a remote controllable camera that has really good night vision and with audio, all viewable via VLC. Sample nigh time pictures to follow 
A New Baby
So, my regular readers might be wondering where all the usefull hacks, hints and tips are?
Well, I have an excuse, my lovely baby girl was born two weeks ago today and so my life has been rather preoccupied with nappies, vomit and bottles.
Never fear, new posts are coming, including hints and tips on using motion to take time lapse movies, a script to automatically update to the latest SVN versions of ffmpeg and x264 among others.
Till then, enjoy the peace and quiet.
Backup Backup Backup – Updated
So, my main storage drive failed yesterday. Admitedly I have been having problems with it over the past few months, with fsck throwing errors on reboot, but yesterday it totally died. One minute it was happily sharing my music out via samba, the next, everything had gone 
Luckily, I run a good backup solution, so all I had to do was get myself a new drive (upgrading to 1TB in the process) and copy over my backed up files.
Simple, but if I wasn’t running my backup solution, I would have been screwed – bye bye to my music, photos and work files.
Thank you rsback and rsync….
(Update)
What is even more awesome, is that since Linux regards everything as a file (so all drives are effectively referred to as files (via the UUID) in Linux (in my case Ubuntu)) swapping out a drive with a new one is very simple. I just updated /etc/fstab with the UUID of the new drive, and then copied over my backed up files to it.
As far as Ubuntu is now concerned, it is the same drive, now only bigger. So all my samba shares and rsync folders all work as before.
God I love Linux.
XBMC and 1080p
I got myself a full HD TV over Xmas, a 32″ Full HD LCD TV from Panasonic (ok ok, the purests may say that you don’t need FullHD with a 32″ screen, but I say I dont need or want a TV half the size of my wall dominating my sitting room…). XBMC on it is just out of this world beautiful. Totally awesome. Anyone who is using XBMC on an old CRT needs to update NOW, it makes it SO much better.
Google Gives £12.4 Million To Charity For Christmas
At least one company hasn’t forgotten the true meaning of Christmas. Google has announced that it will be giving £12.4 million to charity for Xmas. Good on you Google.
Happy Christmas To All
So, it’s that time of year, and I’d like to wish all my readers a very Happy Christmas and a great New Year (well, it can’t be much worse than this one ). It’s been a brilliant year for pruperting, we’ve been going for just over a year now and we have already quadrupled our readership. I look forwarding to regaling you all with hints, tips, rants and posts next year.
Keep on rocking
You know it’s Xmas when VLC tells you so ;)
Ahh, good old VLC, you always know it’s Christmas time again when your VLC icon changes to a nice Xmassy one:
Yup, it’s definately Christmas now.
Happy Xmas and a great New Year to all my readers, lets hope 2010 is the year that gets us out of this horrible global mire….
Google Chromium OS – I was right!
So, the first build of Chromium is released and as I predicted, it is simply a super-fast web-browsing platform, no more, no less. All those people who are criticising it for not being an MS killer are totally missing the point of it. It is meant to allow you to quickly and easily access the web and Google’s services, using devices manufactured by certain partners. Why would it try to compete with the likes of Ubuntu and Fedora, when both are so advanced and well supported already?
There will be a lot of disappointed people out there, when they see what Chromium is, but that is only because there are lots of people out there who don’t understand what Google wanted to achieve and were, as usual, being unrealistic about what it could achieve.
Microsoft’s I’m not cool enough for a Mac Awesomeness
So, Microsoft’s new add that highlights how much more expensive a Mac is compared to a similarly specced Windows PC has caused a lot of comment, on Zdnet for example.
It makes a good point and it is very amusing reading the SAFB writing in comments to defend Mac.
The truth of the Mac matter is, due to its price, Macs are set at a price point that only people with a high disposable income can afford them. Buying one shows that you earn a decent amount of money and care enough about outside appearances that you want to own a laptop that ‘looks cool.’ Most of the comments I have read about current Mac owners wanting to upgrade to a new Mac talk about the newer Mac ‘looking cooler’ and even Apple’s own advert on TV for its most recent Mac book talks about how it looks amazing (milled out of one piece of metal with a glass screen etc.), in fact it makes no mention of if it has any performance improvements at all.
If you ask me, the reason SAFB get so angry about defending their precious products, it is because deep down, they feel a little guilty that they have spent so much money on what is the laptop equivalent of buying a big red Ferrari.