Seminar Room Cameras

Can one use a cheap IP security camera to stream seminars from a seminar room? Yes, but there are pitfalls. So that others may learn from my mistakes, here are some of the issues I found. Linux was used throughout.

• Image quality: avoiding white-outs and rainbows
• PTZ and Python: controlling a PTZ camera from python
• HLS without transcoding: using ffmpeg to produce a dual bitrate HLS stream without transcoding overheads
• LD_PRELOAD and TCP keep-alives: detecting when the camera is unplugged, and restarting gracefully
• Hardware used