Support embedded YouTube cam feeds?
I wanted to add a public video feed from here: http://explore.org/live-cams/player/brown-bear-salmon-cam-brooks-falls its a youtube live stream of bears fishing in a waterfall in Alaska. this URL itself wont work in the media box. What will?
Answers
Media Tiles currently use very simple HTML <img> tags at this time. These support a rather limited set of content formats (still images, GIFs, MJPEG streams, ...).
Embedding other types of Media is a good feature request and may be considered for incremental implementation a few types at a time.
YouTube embedding has some particular requirements that we have not yet explored.
Terry,
Thanks for a great product!
I think that there are a lot of us that would really appreciate this feature. I would love to add a live stream of the beach to my Tiles such as the following. For me, live surf and wind conditions are very useful.
With YouTube being one of the premier content providers on the planet, I think folks would find countless implementations if this option was available.
Thanks again!
Brian
Thanks for the compliments and encouragement, Brian.
I have converted this Topic into an Idea/Feature Request.
Please be sure to allocate Topic Votes 👍🏼 to it.
Hi Greg,
There's no way to embed YouTube currently; but we're looking into it.
Thanks,
...Terry.
Terry,
Thanks for the clarification. So just that I have it straight for the most part the only live video that can be displayed is from cameras on your network, such as from a PeE camera?
PS. Just started and stayed up way to late last night getting my first panel built. This is a fabulous tool and looking forward to integrating it into my ever-growing ST network! Wish I had found it earlier.
Thanks,
Greg
Not exactly accurate, Greg...
ActionTiles Media Tile source addresses are simply wrapped in an <img> tag; which means they are compatible with JPG, PNG, GIF, and MJPEG or MJPG. The last two are streaming video protocols, without sound. (The experimental Nest Cam™ Media Tile is different type of feed, and so far just an example which may lead to other types of embedding.)
ActionTiles basically does no processing of the address or source material, except for periodic refreshes of the still images or GIFs, and a bit of kickstarting during the Panel load process. There is no method for us to pass through Authentication Credentials (login / password), unless they are in the URL as parameters.
Many "old" IP cameras (Foscam and similar) provide MJPEG feeds with "?user=userid&pwd=password" parameters, Newer cameras do not. While they may offer still images (which work pretty well with say, a 5 or 10 seconds refresh rate), video streaming is wrapped in ONVIF or RTSP (likely to handle compression/decompression of the higher resolution of these cameras). While there are plugins available for Windows and Mac browsers to embed RTSP, there are none for Android and iOS.
Similarly, cloud video sources, like YouTube and cloud-only IP cameras (Wyze Cam), cannot be embedded into a Media Tile. YouTube wraps video in HTML5 <video> tags, but the internal contents are handled differently from browser to browser.
To stream from unsupported camera sources, you need to transcode from whatever format into unprotected MJPEG. This can be done by any server on your LAN. There are several pieces of software that can do this, such as Blue Iris (Windows), VLC/FFmpeg, Kerberos.io, Streameye, ... etc., and the TinyCam Pro Android App. This last one is particularly compelling, because for a small number of cameras, it might be able to run in the background on the same tablet on which you are running ActionTiles. Blue Iris is more powerful, but requires a Windows machine as a server.
Apps like Blue Iris and TinyCam are very sophisticated in the very wide range of camera models they support, and the features they have for displaying multiple concurrent streams, and outputting transcoded streams to a web server, and so on. To replicate this is really out of the scope of ActionTiles. But they may be perfect companion apps.
I hope this overview was helpful ☺️.
Thanks,
...Terry.
HI Terry,
Sorry if i'm a bit old school with this, but why not provide a straight iframe tile? You can then put any web content into it. Yes I know its bad practice but it can be made secure with tokens etc. A youtube stream is a snap. Any webpage can do it.
We have a Feature Request for iFrame Tiles, general case: https://support.actiontiles.com/communities/12/topics/1107-iframe-tiles-web-page-embedding
Vote!... Thanks!.
To embed a YouTube video, do the following:
- Open the YouTube video you wish to embed.
- Click Share > Embed.
- Copy the `src` attribute of the presented code snippet.
- In ActionTiles, add a new Shortcut using the URL above.
- Create a new IFrame Tile using the Shortcut above.
Done!
Customer support service by UserEcho
To embed a YouTube video, do the following:
Done!
Hi Greg,
There's no way to embed YouTube currently; but we're looking into it.
Thanks,
...Terry.
We have a Feature Request for iFrame Tiles, general case: https://support.actiontiles.com/communities/12/topics/1107-iframe-tiles-web-page-embedding
Vote!... Thanks!.