The Subtle Art of Trial and Error

The Subtle Art of Trial and Error

Byrichard

For 40 CHF you can buy a Tapo or Xiaomi webcam and it is almost ready to be used as a webcam. You take it out of the box, plug it in, add an SD card, download the app, pair it with the phone and let the phone connect it to wifi and then it detects motion, can take video, photos and more, with ease. In such an environment it’s easy to forget about what we called “Plug and pray” back in the day.

Back in the geeky old days of computing there was a lot of trial and error to get things to work. You would try one thing, and see if it worked, and then another, and then a third, and then a fourth, and eventually you would either find a solution, or give up. One of the reasons I switched to Apple, rather than Linux, in 2003, is that I wanted to be able to connect to the university’s wifi with ease. I expected that if I used a linux machine I would struggle with wifi.

Apple is the leader in making everything work so flawlessly, as long as they want you to do things, that trial and error is part of history. Apple controls everything, to ensure that it works “flawlessly”. I put “flawlessly in quotation marks because my phone crashes or hangs on almost every one of my walks. I rebooted it today and yesterday, while walking. If I take photos during a walk the phone acts up and freezes, and stops the podcast I’m listening to.

I’m being distracted. The point is that Apple, until recently, was known for producing reliable devices. Windows is also known for dumbing down their devices more and more. They try to make it so that users just click install, and the computer does the rest. Usually webcams, printers and more are plug and play.

With Linux you’re using a tinkerer’s OS so things can be simple, if you buy a generic webcam and plug it in. I tried to set an android phone up as a webcam and it worked within minutes. Integration with Home Assistant was smooth and efficient.

With a Raspberry Pi 3b and a Raspberry Pi zero 2 W I have struggled for three or four hours trying to get the camera to work. You have to do A, and then you need to do B and then you need to do C. You also need to wire the camera into the board the right way.

As you’re doing this from a CLI you’re not seeing whether the webcam is giving a picture or not. I tried to take pictures and it appeared to take them but when I tried to get motion to work with the camera to stream to a device with a web browser I just see nothing. I get an error message about the camera not being available.

I know that the right camera is detected because I see it in the output. I just haven’t taken the time to see if the images generated correspond to what I expect them to be. The subtle art of of trial and error is about having a goal and tweaking and experimenting until you get the result you want to get.

The first error is that I wired the camera the wrong way. The second error is that I don’t need to use the legacy camera option with this camera. The third error is that I’m trying to get a Pi and camera module to work as a webcam before I get it to work within its own device.

I am so used to Windows, MacOS and dedicated hardware being so reliable that I forget about the trial and error part of computing that was once so familiar to those of us geeky enough to spend hours of our free time playing with computers. When computers just work it’s easy for everyone to be a geek, because turning it off and on again is easy. So is plugging in a USB device.

My aim is not to build a CinePi.My aim is to setup a webcam that I can see via Home Assistant. I can then add motion detection and more features when I achieve the initial goal of building a Raspberry pi webcam server in minutes“. The instructions are for the V2 module, or a logitech device, and I’m using the V3 module, so the instructions need to be updated. That’s why I’m struggling, and that’s why it’s interesting to do these projects.

I came across this challenge when following programming courses that were over a year old. Sometimes I had to look for the new way of doing things to get the code to behave as it was expected to. Sometimes ChatGPT, Bard and Bing are helpful to find the up to date way of doing things. It is also a case of Reading the Fabulous Manual (RTFM).

There are at least ten Home Assistant Camera integrations to experiment with, so if the method I have been experimenting with doesn’t work I still have 9 other solutions to experiment with. The FFMPEG option looks interesting.

The Subtle Art of Trial and Error Summarised

I call it the subtle art of trial and error because the art lies in learning a methodology by which to come up against an issue and to develop a system by which to resolve the issue in an increasingly short amount of time. The point isn’t in knowing how to do things. It’s in knowing where to look for help. It used to be called Google Fu.

I could easily buy a webcam for 12-30 CHF now but by experimenting with various “integrations” I invest my time in learning new skills and that has value. If I get FFMPEG to work, then I can potentially build my own camera systems. Instead of reverting to film like some, I could go the other way, and experiment with concepts similar to the Cinepi.

The Francofous yahoo Live wall

Byrichard

The Francofous are a good group of people and last night we spent a few hours playing with Yahoo Live and skype. Skype provided the audio whilst yahoo live provided the video platform. Yahoo live is limited in the way we can watch and follow video so I created a simple video wall. The principle is simple. i get all the videos embedded into one page and we can watch everyone chat with everyone else. It’s a really nice experience and I’m going to improve the layout for future games.

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Yahoo live

Byrichard

Yahoo live is an interesting live video conferencing tool still in it’s early days. It allows you to stream video live from your webcam and watch up to four other streams at the same time. There’s a chatroom and you can see all the participants at once and select which ones you want in vision and which you’d prefer out of vision.

There are a few bugs at the moment. I haven’t found sound that easy to deal with, especially since there’s a five to ten second delay. Chatting with Msiou he told me that what he had done is use skype conference calls to keep the conversation going. Of course this is a makeshift solution and some better interaction should come.

My Channel, My live profile

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Operator 11, Your Own Television Show

Byrichard

Operator 11 has taken video sharing and webcasting to the next level. Whereas websites such as youtube, google video, myspace, and Facebook all allow you to upload and share videos this one allows you two additional features.


The first difference can be spotted when you sign up and arrive at the profile page. Rather than have text dialogue boxes you are offered a set of questions. You are expected to respond to these with a video message. You can describe who you are, what films and television you like, what books and interests you have.


As a result, your status as a lurker has already been compromised. People see you and you see them. That’s just the first step.


It’s whilst watching The Old Grey Video test that I saw the great potential that this website has. It allows you to switch between webcams in different countries. What this means is that the presenter presents the show and tells everyone about the program before introducing his guests, at which point he switches from his camera to that of one of the guests. As a result of this technology, a video dialogue between individuals is possible.


You may deal with the video content in a number of ways. The first of these is that you start a show and just talk until you run out of things to say before quitting the show and stopping the Livestream. The second option is to go into the video library. Here you can see your old shows and comments, you can upload video clips with a size limit of 200 megabytes, plenty for video inserts. The third option is to record some videos straight from the computer to the website.


Once this step is complete the fun may really begin. You go to create a show and have the choice between starting the show immediately or scheduling it for another time of day. If you start the show immediately then a few people may hear about the show but there’s a good chance that the viewership is low. A second option is that you schedule the show for a different time and day. As a result of this, you may tell your friends that at a specific time you will have a live show.


Now that the first two steps are done and that your show is about to start you start preparing your inserts and making sure that your guest video streams are ready. The clips which you had selected earlier and uploaded are now all in the video library. You may select up to 9 video streams ready for playout when you chose to cue them. Assuming you’ve had a show for a while you may roll the intro clip introducing the show. You may select a second source, for example, your camera and press cue. What the cue does is tell the website’s software that the next source should be your camera. Once the intro finishes rolling you’re on, telling the world about your show, and during this time you’re going to go to select another source, for example, some interview from the street. You cue that source and select to broadcast that stream. The camera’s off you and you’ve got time to prepare the next clip.


When preparing the clips you can preview them, making sure that it’s the right clip. Once that’s done you cue that as the next video. As long as the clips are long enough in duration you can keep switching from clip to clip. If you’ve got more videos than sources simply replace a video you’ve already played with another one.


Whilst I have not yet had the chance to switch between live sources through this software I have watched how it is used. Already I’ve found that there are three or four social groups that are part of the system. As one group of friends sits in one apartment another individual is watching them. If he chooses to he can go into the “live” room. Once he’s in there the “director” can see the video stream coming in whilst the guest can make a request to be on camera or to play a video clip. That’s the business end of this software because that’s what allows conversations to occur between individuals. At times this may be between two people but at other times this may be between a cluster of live feeds. As a result, you can talk to anyone around the world about any topic. It’s great.


In the past few hours of use, I have seen computer gaming shows, teens talking to other teens, cats playing with string, and walking on ledges. I have seen people play music on request and live events in various parts of the world. As a result, there is an interesting diversity of programs on offer.


It’s also a great learning experience. Having done vision mixing, directing, studio camera operator, and insert editor with full production crews mainly for my university course I find this environment is quite complete. It’s a simple but powerful user interface and I should be giving it a proper try out at 8 pm British summertime, 12am PST. The show will be called twitter vox and should discuss the twitter phenomenon.


An additional bonus is the fact that you can plug a DV input into your laptop and the source will be recognised as a result of which you can get a much higher quality video image, aside from pixelation. Better than not seeing anything.


Overall I think this is one of the most interesting video sites I’ve seen in a long time and I plan on using it to its full potential.