I have just found a flawless method of streaming an IP weather camera on a website! This is something that some of you may know, has cost me hours and hours of painstaking, backbreaking labour to find a method of trying to embed the video from both of my cams on my site. Every time I tried it, one method worked but didn’t play in certain browsers, other methods I tried never worked properly or caused serious buffering issues, and one method played flash which some browsers didn’t like and some browsers were either incompatible or couldn’t find the right plugin. I was starting to get so discouraged.
So while I was on a break at my office last week, I did a Google search for how to embed HTML5 video on a web page, and a result for Unreal Media Server popped up. I’m not sure if any of you have ever heard of Unreal Media Server, and it was entirely new to me as well, but I downloaded their 64-bit server software (which is very small), installed it on my server, and configured RTSP streaming for each cam with a separate profile, and set the port on my router to the required ports. But one thing puzzled me - I couldn’t find the code to include the image on my website, so I went to their streaming HTML5 demo page, which shows a tropical place with palm trees and people walking around and I thought I could do this if I just borrowed their code. So I right-clicked on the page and copied their code and put it on a test page on my server. When I changed the IP address to my own and changed the port number, and entered my camera profile name in the correct space, I went back to my website and reloaded the page, and there it was! My south-facing camera has been running continuously for the last 15 minutes without one second of video being lost! What I truly love about this software is that it doesn’t take up any bandwidth unless someone is viewing your camera, AND it works in ALL browsers! I tested IE, Firefox, Chrome and Edge. It doesn’t play on my iPhone but that isn’t really important to me anyway.
I encourage anyone having any issues with embedding their cameras on their weather page to try Unreal Media Server! I know this sounds like a commerical, but it isn’t, and it’s genuinely coming from my heart as this is a real product that I believe in for attaining your IP camera streaming goals.
Please visit their website at http://www.umediaserver.net.
You can see them working on my test site at http://sandbox.dansmith.ca.
I’d be happy to help any of you having any problems. Just shoot me a PM, or reply to this post.
Cheers,
Dan