Raspberry Pi cameras

Hi Taz,
I use raspberry pis in all of my boxes (5) and have a mix of the v1, knockoff v1 (£3 ebay) and v2 cameras. All work well, but unfortunately no nest this year although you can see some stills (from video) and some videos on my nest box 2020 thread.

For quite a while I was using a motion capture script called pi-timolo. It uses graphics processing to detect movement and can be configured to record a video or a still when it happens. It is OK but not great - e.g. you have to configure the video length (I have 30s) so you will always get a 30s video regardless of how long the bird stays in the nest. Also it crashes occasionally, and uses quite a lot of processing power to do the motion capture and also gives a fair few false positives (you can tweak the settings to help). I'm quite sure there are a lot of better options out there but I have been too lazy to look into them.

On my newer boxes I use PIR sensors to detect motion instead of video analysis. This uses much less processing power (none, effectively) but can also have false positive issues. They are very sensitive, though - even a wasp will set them off inside the box, so I don't think I miss much. I run these with a python script I wrote myself which just waits for a trigger then films until the trigger stops. I have a small application on my desktop PC that just polls each of my pis for a new video, and alerts me (with a still of the first frame) when there is one.

All of the above is just for detecting motion prior to nesting, but when I did have a nest (2 years ago) I just streamed to Youtube live using ffmpeg from the command line. This worked well enough, and I just used to watch the stream on our telly in the kitchen via the normal youtube app.

There are so many different ways to approach streaming from a pi, it really depends on what you want, so have a Google around for some more ideas.