caveywavy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 15, 2024 1:16 amA number of years ago I built my own night vision camera system using a Raspberry Pi 3 with the noIR camera
Inspired by that post, I made one too a few years ago.
I made 2 really long posts about it back on the old forum, but I'm not sure if either of them made it into the archive.
To recap...
Having a USB webcam with
OBS running on your PC is (IMO) the most manageable way to setup a long recording. You don't have to worry about storage space or battery power. You can tweak your encoder settings to get the file-size you want. For example, if you need to set up a 10 hour recording, you can pick your settings, record for 1 minute and see how big of a file that creates (then do the maths of x60 minutes x10 hours). I like to target maybe 70GB for a 10 hour recording, but you might not need even that, since it depends on how high quality your camera is to begin with. I think I was ending up with maybe 30GB for my Raspberry Pi recordings, since the resolution/quality isn't all that high no matter how high your encoder settings.
The Raspi hardware is actually pretty simple to setup if you use
ShowMeWebcam. The GitHub page might look intimidating, but you basically need to burn an image to an SD card, and the whole thing just works. You plug it in via USB, and boom, you have a night-vision webcam. Be warned however, (at the time of writing) this project has NOT been updated for the more modern Raspberry Pi's, so if you're purchasing a Pi specifically for this, you need to be very sure about what you're buying. There are ready-made USB webcams that have IR illumination, but I haven't ventured to try any (since their quality doesn't seem much better than what I have now).
Really it all comes down to whether or not you can sleep with the lights on. I really struggle with that, so the night-vision is a must-have for me. But it might not be for you. In which case a normal webcam (with an accompanying USB ring-light) might work just fine.
Either way, I love OBS as the backbone of the recording operation. I also highly recommend a program called
LosslessCut for chopping your 10 hour recording down to only the best parts (quickly and without needing to re-compress). Then loading it into
Handbrake if you need to compress it further.
I've recorded probably over 100 nights at this point (across various ab-streaks), so I've been quite interested in finding an optimal solution to this.
I haven't managed to capture a wet-dream, because I still haven't had one, but the recordings of my random night boners are on-point.
The other major challenges are sleeping in weird new positions (so the camera can see your crotch), and sleeping with minimal blanket coverage, which is a total nightmare if you live in a colder climate. Many times I've woken up after a few hours sleep, and my pelvis is uncomfortably cold after hours of exposure, and I can't get back to sleep unless I cover up (and abandon the recording).
It can be pretty challenging, but I'd start with OBS and slowly build-up a recording process, find out what works or doesn't, and build-out from there.
Bare in mind that I haven't tried a lot of other solutions, so there may be other, better suggestions here. Some of which I'll be looking into myself.