If you use the 3D printer camera streams to check the progress of printers while outside of Asmbly, please reply to this thread. We’re trying to gauge whether these are useful enough to justify the bandwidth they use.
These Video Feeds are the ones I mean.
I do regularly, especially for long prints on the XL.
That being said, frame rate could be SUBSTANTIALLY reduced if necessary. 1 frame every 10 seconds would be very useful still.
I don’t know if they can be configured to less than 1 fps, which is where I think I left them. I was wondering if static images (reload to get another one) would be good enough.
Not a user of the 3D print shop yet, but I think that this capability would be very important (asmbly is a 20-30 minute drive for me).
However if the docs on the wiki are current the answer to “is this worth the bandwidth?“ would probably be no. Sending the full-resolution video to Amazon’s cloud (not the cheapest bandwith) all the time whether or not anyone is watching is a little too much.
Changing it to a consistently updated still image, or just stopping the stream when no one has booked the corresponding printer would get 90%+ the benefits with less usage.
Rescaling it at the shop before streaming it out would probably be more involved, but is also something to look into. There isn’t much benefit to having higher resolution than “part looks halfway done“ until you get to the level of “I can see the layer lines getting messed up when I zoom in“
Because of limitations on where we can physically place the cameras, we don’t get the best bang for the buck in terms of resolution (there are lots of “wasted” pixels in the 1280x960 frame). For example, we only care about the highlighted1/4 of this view:
Of course, because the printers aren’t fixed in position, that bounding box changes from time to time as people move them slightly.
We can try turning the resolution down until we can just tell whether the print is spaghettiing.
The data exists to determine the printer state (printing or idle, time remaining in the print), so in theory someone could add an overlay to the video with time remaining or stop the video when the printer is idle.
Though the fact that Apollo hasn’t reported data in 18 hours and Poseidon is currently showing up as Offline is a warning about how reliable this currently is.
If someone is excited to figure out how to pre-process the video before it leaves the building, they’re welcome to take a stab at it.
I’ve used it before to monitor long prints from home. It’s nice for that. Although I’m not sure I would want to drive in if it did fail 
I only use the 3D printers sporadically, but I do find myself checkng the feed for longer (10+ hours) prints. My logic being if something fails I would drop a message on slack to see if anyone could stop it for me.
Okay, thanks. This is enough feedback to validate that we should keep the cameras around in some form. We’ll look into some ways we can do it with lower bandwidth impact.
This could be a good question for the home tinkering sig tonight. How do people stream their home cameras only when a client is connected?
I plan to be there, I’ll ask around.
Do you know what software restreamer.asmbly.org is using today?
If we rev the camera system generally, I’d love to have spaghetti detective and/or notifications to users with active bookings… 
It’s using Restreamer
If Skedda had an API we could use, notifications to the active user (not necessarily driven by cameras) would be awesome. However it doesn’t.
Yes, their integrations seem pretty minimal. Connect to apps NOT supported in Zapier | Skedda Support
It’s definitely possible, but probably only a nice to have and would be pretty high effort.
I wanted to clarify something: everyone is welcome to use the video feed links on the printer pages ( Prusa XL - Asmbly Wiki , Prusa MK3S+ - Asmbly Wiki ). Using those video feed links doesn’t cause problems for Asmbly.
Those video feeds are served from a restreamer that is outside of Asmbly and has plentiful bandwidth. The bandwidth problem is getting the streams from Asmbly’s shop to the restreamer, which happens all of the time whether or not anyone is actually watching the stream.
