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Originally Posted by Calvin1961
The latest "feature" that cause ENDLESS headaches is their wondrous "change resolutions" approach to the broadcast stream. The idea is actually sound, if upload bandwidth becomes an issue, drop the senders video resolution to keep the framerate reasonable. Their implementation however TOTALLY SUCKS.
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To tell you the truth, I've never noticed the "change resolutions" approach, but I'm sure that's because I never use Cam4 anymore.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Calvin1961
I've already found the "orphaned stream" situation can trip your tool up to Elgero. The librtmp module chokes on it and responds in the log with "cannot connect to stream" or similar. Presumably it has picked up a "dead" stream, not the currently live one :-(
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That it picks up a "dead" stream is a server problem, because Cam4 Grabber does the exact same rtmp handshake as the swf player to request the rtmp url of the video stream from the server. I do know that Cam4 uses two streams, one for logged in viewers and one for guest viewers. When it's not possible to record a webcam as a guest, then you won't be able to view the webcam, as a guest, in your browser either. Viewing/recording webcams when logged in always seems to work fine. Cam4 has this problem for years now and that's also one of the reasons why the first version of this tool required you to enter your login details. Maybe Cam4 does this on purpose, to force people to register an account.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Calvin1961
I am using this approach in my MkII script system. It actually works VERY well, the server response is a single 1 line text message, either an rtmp string, or "not_broadcasting" and a few other possible responses, so the traffic generated is VERY low, probably less than loading the standard web pages !
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Yes, it does work for a simple script, but not when you have 100, 200, 300 broadcasters in your watchlist. This means that you're hammering the server hundreds of times every few minutes. It takes about 300ms to get a response from the server, so checking hundreds of broadcasters can take a few minutes, especially if you get a few timeouts.