SANParks.org Forums

Thank you for being here too, Danie !
Your zooming in made the pics great !!

Danie

Have nossob up on the care homes big plasma in the lounge, the old folk are waiting and watching------mike

Mike

The satellite link to Nossob is a bit busy at the moment and the control of the webcam is very slow at the moment.....bear with me...if I give an instruction to the webcam via satellite, it takes more than a minute for it to respond at this stage....but hang in there...we'll get there!

Eish! The Nossob webcam stopped taking instructions from me...it refuses to react on my zoom or move commands - satellite links to our parks are very busy at the moment with our normal data traffic and that might be the reason why it is not listening!

I'll keep on trying!

AHA! It listened!

Thankyou Danie and all cammers!

With the lions resting under the tree we might be lucky today and see a 'kill' on the cam! WOW!

THANKS and thanks again Danie for spending last night and this morning with us, and great posts by so many of you cammers maybe some action later in the afternoon---- mike

There are various webcams around the internet where panning and zoom control is available to general users. Is there any intention to pass this type of control to users of any of the webcams on this site, and if not, are there any technical reasons for not doing so?

For example, at St Andrews golf club in Scotland, the webcam on the 18th fairway is controllable for pan and zoom, and restricted for 60 seconds per user per session. Such a facility would allow for viewers to not only zoom into specific animals at the waterhole, but to scan the area when the actual waterhole is devoid of activity, capture the image, and place it on the site for other forumites to see. Clearly, this facility could be, if appropriate, restricted to registered users only, so that any abuse could be monitored, and ongoing violators banned from future control.

Just a thought

Hi Scotm

Thanks for the suggestion! Yes, we have thought of that!

If the cams were not in the bush where bandwidth is very little, it would have been possible.

I checked now for example. It took almost 2 minutes for the cam to react upon my instruction. It does not react immediately upon a zoom/pan insructruction and it does make it quite tricky!

As soon as bandwidth becomes more available in these remote areas, we will consider it for sure! There is also a security issue (as the webacams are part of our internal network) but that can be addressed by technology and network setup.

Hang in there...one day!

For example to get the image of the lions in the shade at the moment, I had to switch the autofocus on the webcam off (which took some time). I then had to manaully focus the webcam by hand (taking the time lag into consideration) to ensure that the foreground is out of focus. The webcam is usually in autofocus mode and focuses on objects closest to the webcam causing the lions in the background to be out of focus. If the lion or animal moves, you have to think ahead and guess what it is going to do! Remember the webcam only reacts some time after my action. if the link was something like 8Mb/s it would have been much easier!

So it becomes quite tricky with the slow data links to the webcams.

Oh for the days when the local telecomms availability, bandwidth and costs match those of our friends across the pond

Yes, I hope it will become much better soon! The new bandwidth being added via the undersea cables, will benefit our country a lot but our problem will remain for some time to come - the last mile (or several miles) in the rural areas do not get any and it will remain a physical technical challenge for a while!!

Danie, many thanks for the sterling job you are doing keeping those lions on the cam.

JUst came in, logged on, and there were my favourite lions