BPL FishTank goes online!
Parents who visit the Belleville Public Library know, there is a fish tank on the way to our children’s department. Thanks to the services of Absolutely Fish we keep the tank stocked with colorful friendly swimming critters and fun decorations.
You can now see our fish even when you are not presently in the library. You can find the livestreawm on our website at www.bellepl.org/fishtank.
Now for the nerdy stuff:
This is the product of a cool little SteamPunk Engineer project from our TeenCenter/Makerspace.
We used a Raspberry Pi 4B with the “lite” verison of the Raspberrian OS to minimize demands on the hardware. This means that there is no Graphic Interface or visual desktop to control it. This means that there is less overhead on the system. We added an inexpensive USB webcam and power supply to complete our hardware setup.
Our entire system is configured using the Command Line Interface (CLI) and scripts. We used ffmpeg, a powerful encoder to stream audio and video files with a high degree of control and customization.
Musical Accompaniment
We gathered a collection of songs from the YouTube Audio Library. It is a great source for music and sound effects to enhance your streams legally on YouTube. It is undeniable that you have heard these songs more than once but that is the reason why. Thank you! to all you contributors in the Audio Library. You’ve made the world a better place through your generosity.
We made a simple text based playlist, with cleaned up file names, and fed it into ffmpeg. We combined it with the video stream from the USB webcam. Ffmpeg delivered that to a dedicated YouTube channel for livestreaming.
YouTube has some peculiarities regarding embedding audio that require it be muted by default. At the same time YouTube requires that audio be included for live streaming. Additionally we also disabled the YouTube controls in order to address some problems embedding the stream on our website. In order to see the BPL FishTank channel and listen to the music simultaneously you can do so by going to https://youtube.com/@bplfishtank?si=rU8uWmDSBb–I9ve. Alternatively, you can click on the YouTube icon on the stream at www.bellepl.org/fishtank. You can find a list of all the songs being used in the stream in the description on the BPL Fishtank YouTube channel.
There are a likely to be a few pitfalls and tweaks that need to be addressed and they will be dealt with as they arise. We hope to make this one of the many perks on our website.
Thanks for reading “BPL FishTank goes online” “Nerdy Stuff”!