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.

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.

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.

iSpy has an online camera database that you might use to find the correct URL for your camera: https://www.ispyconnect.com/sources.aspx

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.

By default BBT will always connect to the camera and offer a live feed of the camera.

A buffer of 2-3 minutes will also be recorded in memory, so you will always be able to go back and watch what happened a small time ago, without actually recording anything.

To start and stop recording, use the “Record video” button on the left bottom side of the software (shortcut: F8). This will save the recorded images to disk, so that they can be retrieved a long time after the race.

Using the Video view you can see which timeslots of the video have been recorded. You can also click the buffer of the last 2-3 minutes buffered video and save that to the permanent recording, for example if you forgot to start the video when the first finishers come in.

Note: BBT is optimized for flexibility and easy-of-use, not space. So be sure to have plently of free disk space when recording for long periods.

All video recording (and the live buffer) is kept on the Timing Master. While wathcing/recording, any of the clients connected to the master will be able to freely jump back and forth in all the recorded video, independently of eachother, going forwards, backwards, freezing the frame etc.

This does not impact the recording, that will continue to take place. Even if the camera only allows a single stream open at a time, this is not a problem, as only the Timing Master is directly connected to the camera.

This does, however, incur a slight delay on the live video feed.

Quick jumping

You often need to jump to a specific time in the video, which you can do directly from the Video window and input a timestamp or scroll back and forth on the timeline.

When looking at a specific participant, you can use the participant context menu to quickly jump to the time in the video when the participant crossed the finish line, for photo verification.

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.