The website is the cam's home. But many people prefer to watch where they are anyway. So since the end of September the stream also runs on Twitch, and since early October on YouTube and Kick as well.
Convert once, send three times
The platforms want 16:9 and preferably 1080p. The camera delivers 4:3. So the server crops the picture and converts it, exactly once. This one result goes into an internal channel, and from there three lightweight relays go to the platforms without converting again. The conversion costs about one processor core, each relay almost nothing.
At night and during an outage
Twitch and Kick do not like broadcasts that cut off every evening. So the broadcast runs through:
- At night, when the hens are in the coop, a card sits at the bottom left of the picture: "The hens are asleep in the coop", with the address of the site. The switch happens without a cut, the card is simply faded in and out.
- If the camera fails, the broadcast shows a pause picture instead of a black screen. The pause picture is a pre-rendered short clip on a loop that costs almost no computing time.
- The audio is a silent track. The camera does hear, but that stays in the house.
Small traps
- Kick only accepts the stream on a specific port and path that you will not find prominently anywhere.
- The camera sends timestamps that sometimes jump backwards. Without a small correction for that the audio stutters, even though it is silent.
- Every error of the relay writes the target address including the key into the log. That has been blacked out since, before it lands anywhere.
On all platforms the cam is called peckandclick, by the way, and the English version of the site runs at peckandclick.com. The hens are bilingual.