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Video

BBT has built-in support for video recording of important locations, such as the finish line. It is a very effective tool for verifying results and serves as a visual backup in situations like when a participant is racing without his tag or transponder. Video is a valuable tool to resolve many unforeseen circumstances.

Note: The video feature is work in progress, and is limited and features and options.

Note: You should enable the Video feature on your event to get access to the video functions.

Supported cameras

Short answer: Any IP Camera that is able to deliver a MJPEG stream via HTTP or RTSP.

Two modes of transportation is supported: RTSP and HTTP (multipart/x-mixed-replace). This can be thought of as the way the images are delivered from the camera and into BBT. Almost every consumer IP camera supports at least one of these.

As image codec (the way images are turned into data to be sent on the network), we currently only support MJPEG (Motion JPEG). This is an older more simpler protocol than the standard used by most cameras today. We currently do not support H.264, although we would like to add this in the future.

If your camera does not support MJPEG, see below for a workaround.

Adding a camera

  1. You must enable the Video/timeline features in Event Settings
  2. Go to Devices, and click Add device → IP camera
  3. Enter the URL of the camera stream
  4. Add the camera

Finding the correct URL can be very tricky, since many cameras have very poor documentation, and most are not the same. Often the camera supports multiple streams of different types (on different URLs), so you must select one that outputs a MJPEG stream. Consult your camera provider (or Google) to find out what the URL for your specific camera looks like.

Example URLs can look like this (replace IP and username/password to match your camera):

rtsp://username:password@192.168.1.34/profile1/media.smp http://username:password@192.168.1.227/videostream.cgi

Your camera URL might vary, and may require configuration of your camera. The username and password part can be omitted, if the camera does not require them.

Starting and stopping recording

ToDo: Actions, seeing status, each frame is timestamped (if camera supports it)

Viewing video

ToDo: All clients, live, forward and back ToDo: 2 min cache, can be saved

Slight delay on live video.

Workaround for non-MJPEG cameras using VLC

If your camera does not support MJPEG, or you cannot get it to work properly, you can use the free softwave VLC (https://www.videolan.org) to connect directly to the camera, and send out a video stream:

So instead of a direct connection:

Camera --> BBT

…you can use VLC to convert the video for you:

Camera ---> VLC ---> BBT

Example:

Your camera stream (for example H.264) might be called http://username:password@192.168.1.227/videostream.cgi

Using this command you can tell VLC to connect to that camera, and output an MJPEG stream on URL http://localhost:8080

vlc.exe -vvv -Idummy http://username:password@192.168.1.227/videostream.cgi --sout #transcode{vcodec=MJPG,venc=ffmpeg{strict=1}}:standard{access=http{mime=multipart/x-mixed-replace;boundary=--7b3cc56e5f51db803f790dad720ed50a},mux=mpjpeg,dst=:8080/} --run-time= 10 vlc://quit;

In BBT you can then simply add http://localhost:8080 as the video source.