I recently discovered what I now know to be a Robin's nest in an out building on a rather rural and remote site. I wanted to set up a camera to watch their progress, and bought one of these:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/EasyN-Wir...-/321400698231?pt=UK_CCTV&hash=item4ad4f97577
OK, so it's 28 quid - I'm not expecting much and to be fair, it does do nearly everything it said on the tin; I can control it remotely, the IR works, it has reasonable features for motion detect and sending images etc..
..but the big bug for me is it often references PTZ (pan tilt zoom) but it doesn't actually zoom and focusing is manual, so I had to sneak back to birds nest, ipad in hand and turn the bezel around the lens to focus it after I got it set up..
The other nuisance is that the video stream is MJPEG, which is horrific on bandwidth and this thing runs over a 3G dongle due to the remoteness of the site.. I calculate at its normal streaming rate it will chew through the 10 gigabyte allowance on the dongle in about 15 hours and then go on to cost about £100 an hour to run at 3's "out of package" data rates
So, here I am asking you guys in the camera forum (and I know it's more for live cams rather than hardware discussion, but the end aim is for it to become a live stream) whether you have any hardware recommendations - do you run any bird cams yourself? Critically, it should have pan, tilt, zoom, focus, infrared and h264 video, rather than mjpeg, I guess..
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/EasyN-Wir...-/321400698231?pt=UK_CCTV&hash=item4ad4f97577
OK, so it's 28 quid - I'm not expecting much and to be fair, it does do nearly everything it said on the tin; I can control it remotely, the IR works, it has reasonable features for motion detect and sending images etc..
..but the big bug for me is it often references PTZ (pan tilt zoom) but it doesn't actually zoom and focusing is manual, so I had to sneak back to birds nest, ipad in hand and turn the bezel around the lens to focus it after I got it set up..
The other nuisance is that the video stream is MJPEG, which is horrific on bandwidth and this thing runs over a 3G dongle due to the remoteness of the site.. I calculate at its normal streaming rate it will chew through the 10 gigabyte allowance on the dongle in about 15 hours and then go on to cost about £100 an hour to run at 3's "out of package" data rates
So, here I am asking you guys in the camera forum (and I know it's more for live cams rather than hardware discussion, but the end aim is for it to become a live stream) whether you have any hardware recommendations - do you run any bird cams yourself? Critically, it should have pan, tilt, zoom, focus, infrared and h264 video, rather than mjpeg, I guess..
