Allow YouTube viewer to select the camera

[Vini_au]

Hi all,

I am trying to do something here that I thought was trivial but it doesn’t seem to be.

I would like to stream multiple cameras and allow my YouTube viewers to choose what camera angle they want to watch.

All the information I found online leads to scenes with a montage of different cameras. It seems that the consensus of multiple camera angles is that, which is essentially one stream with multiple cameras on the scene.

Am I missing something here or is this idea of allowing viewers to pick the camera angle not actually possible?

Thanks in advance

Vini

 

[koala]

As far as I know, current streaming services support one video track only, so you can send one camera only. If you want to stream multiple cameras, you need to create a separate stream for each camera.

 

[AaronD]

I suppose a distant possibility would be to hack the 3D video standard to provide two 2D frames...but BOTH ends would have to be hacked to make that work. I don't think most viewers would do that.

Otherwise, koala's right. You can switch cameras *before* the encoder, and there might be a creative way to have the viewers control that, but the stream itself only has a single picture...whatever that single picture might be at a given moment.

 

[Vini_au]

I tend to agree, I have done some research and looks like there is a way with probably expensive paid YouTube service to achieve something like that. But that means you would have to stream all your cameras in parallel to YouTube.

There is however a video on YouTube with a drop-down to choose the camera angle. I will post it here.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

 

[AaronD]

There is however a video on YouTube with a drop-down to choose the camera angle. I will post it here.

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

That was March 2016, and YouTube is constantly changing. Features come and go, sometimes they come back, etc.

I remember when YT's API was awesome and you could automate almost anything with it. Then they killed it to get rid of spambots. Now it's back in a different form, but with nowhere near the original functionality.

Similar for sending someone a clip out of a video. It used to work to just send them the embedded URL that was meant to paste into your own website and be displayed as part of the surrounding site. Just include the autoplay=1&start=xxx&end=yyy options on the end of the URL, and it worked. Then they killed that, so the same URL would just play the entire video, which was really annoying because I used that feature a lot to highlight a particular section instead of trying to use the timestamps that my audience is not even going to notice. Then they added a "snippet" feature that does pretty much the same thing, but it's tied to your account which means you have to *have* an account to do it. You log in, create the snippet, and then you send a link to that snippet and not the video itself. Then I think the embedded URL just started to work again. Not entirely sure on that though.

Anyway, my point is that anything more than a few months old is probably irrelevant in regards to how YouTube works and what it can do. Beyond the dirt-simple concept (incredibly complicated in practice) of simply being a distribution platform. An old-school TV transmitting tower, if you will, and you feed it the exact single signal that you want to broadcast. And even that is subject to change, though not as likely because it's closer to their core business model.