Running A Live Video Stream From A Nestbox

Someone recently asked me how I broadcast my NestCam video live on the web, and so I've decided to post the details here.  There are two basic stages:

1. Getting a live video feed on to your computer (the easy part)
2. Making it available for others to view over the internet (the harder part)

Stage 1

First of all you need to get a camera of some kind for your nest box, or buy a nestcam kit (nest box with a camera and cables included). I did the latter a couple of years ago when I bought a kit from Aldi (as shown above) for £39.99.  The kit allows you to plug the camera into a normal TV SCART socket if you just want to watch the nest in your house or into a DVD or video recorder if you want to record some of the action. I think the design has changed slightly this year and the price has gone up a bit, but if you hold your nerve about buying immediately, they often reduce them after a few weeks along with all the other bird feeding stuff. They might also sell out of course.

If Aldi doesn't have any left (because they only sell them about twice a year) you can always try HandyKam.com who will have everything you need, but at a price. I'd personally stick with a wired rather than a wireless version as they're a lot more reliable and usually have a better quality picture, they don't need batteries in the camera (which will need frequent replacing) and they're cheaper too.  The only downside is having to route the cables into your house.

EasyCap USB Video Capture Adapter

However, if you want to watch or record your birds on a computer, an extra bit of hardware is needed - a video capture device of some sort.  You may be lucky and already have one of these on your desktop computer, just look for a yellow RCA/phono socket on the back or even the front of the case (many desktop computers now have these included as standard).

If you haven't got a video capture device, the easiest thing to do is buy an EasyCap USB video capture adapter, the sort of thing used for transferring VHS or camera videos to a computer.  They're quite cheap at between £5 and £12 if you look around the web such as here on Amazon, eBay or similar places.

Most video capture devices use the yellow RCA/phono sockets for input and so like me, you may need a female to female SCART adapter to get from the camera to the capture card.  You'll also need a SCART to phono converter plug which has three phono (yellow, red and white) output sockets on it and a triple phono cable with the same colour plugs on each end - yellow is for video, red is for right audio and white for left audio Again these things are quite cheap on the web being usually less than £3 each. You can even get some of them in one of the many 'Pound' shops around.

Once you have got all this or similar stuff, you're ready to connect it into your computer by following these steps:

1. Plug the camera SCART into one side of the female to female SCART adapter
2. Plug the SCART to phono converter plug in to the other side of it
3. Plug the three coloured phonos of the phono cable into the correctly coloured plug sockets
4. Plug the other end of the cable into the video capture device sockets using just the yellow phono if there's only one socket, otherwise match the colours up correctly
5. If the video capture device is USB, plug it into one of your computer or laptop's USB sockets

A picture of my actual connections will appear here soon.  If you can plug your camera straight into to your video capture device, you won't need any of the above adaptors and cables.

When you've done this you need to turn your computer on and download some software to view the video.  I currently use YawCam because it's free and it contains a web server for streaming video over the web from your own computer.  In the past I've also used a similar product called WebCamXP which is also free for one camera, but it displays the software's name label superimposed on the video stream and I don't really like that. It also costs money to have more than one camera in use, whereas I can run two cameras with YawCam for free.

Download and install YawCam, set the video capture device to your EasyCap USB or internal capture device's name and preview the video from the camera on your computer.  When this is all setup and working, you are ready for Stage 2.  I'll expand on using YawCam in this part later.

Stage 2 - The short version

To let people view your live nestcam video over the internet, you'll need to have your own website or blog set up already.  To set up a website is beyond the scope of these details, but the way I do it is to use a free Blogger blog like this one, where you can add HTML (webpage) code to a posting or page.

If you know about IP addresses, 'port forwarding' and how to log into your router, then just do the following:

1) Log into your router and find out the external WAN or internet IP address of your cable or ADSL / DSL modem - write this down as you will need it later (mine is 94.170.221.144)

2) Use the DOS command ipconfig to find out the internal IP address of the computer you are running the YawCam software on - mine is 192.168.1.30

3) Find the 'Port Forwarding' section in your router's menu (usually accessed through a browser) and add a 'Port Forwarding service' here.  You need to set the internal IP address to that of the computer running YawCam and allow http access on ports 8081 to 8888.  On my Netgear router it looks like this:

The IP address of my router is 192.168.1.1 and is shown at the top and the internal IP address of the computer running YawCam is 192.168.1.30 as can be seen lower down on the right.

4) Include this HTML code on the webpage through which you want people to view your nestcam:

<div>
<applet archive="YawApplet.jar" code="YawApplet.class" codebase="http://94.170.221.144:8081" height="312" width="416">
<param name="Host" value="94.170.221.144" />
<param name="Port" value="8081" />
<param name="Zoom" value="true" /> </applet>
</div>

In this code you need to change my modem's IP address (94.170.221.144) to the IP address of your own modem which you wrote down in Step 1 above.  Then, when your web page is displayed live on the internet, the user's browser looks for an IP address from which to get the YawCam code (94.17.221.144 in this case) and your router forwards the request through port 8081 to the YawCam server running on your local computer. The Java code then sends the live video stream back to the user's browser through the same port. Does this make sense? You don't need to understand it to get it work though!

5) Make sure that you 'enable' the video stream in YawCam and then use the YawCam test pages to check that your video stream is online and working.

6) Finally, open the web page in which you included the code to check that it is working and that the live video can be seen.  If it can be seen on your computer via this code, it should be able for anyone in the world to see it. Wow!

Stage 2 - The longer version

It's difficult to describe how to setup 'Port Forwarding' in general terms, because every home network, modem and router is slightly different, but I'll try to give some basic pointers of how to do this shortly.