We picked out a new kitty from the shelter almost three weeks ago and she immediately discovered how to go into the basement and hide inside the walls. For nearly three weeks now we haven't seen the kitty at all; she sneaks out of the basement to come get food and use litter box in the middle of the night and immediately returns to hiding. My brilliant plan 1) Setup a webcam to stream video for the view of the food dish and litter box using VLC. 2) Attach some heavy duty string to the basement door and run it to the master bedroom. 3) View the webcam stream from laptop in the bedroom and pull string to shut door as soon as I see kitty at dish or entering litter box. Outcome of Round 1 VLC worked like a charm for creating and monitoring the stream; however, there was at least a 30 second delay between what was happening in real-time and when it appeared on the monitoring laptop. I saw the kitty on the screen at 5:06:38 AM and pulled the string to shut the door but when I searched there was no sign of kitty anywhere in the upper levels. FAIL on Round 1 Plans for Round 2 1) Eliminate use of VLC for stream and use Skype on both systems to establish Video Call for monitoring food dish and litterbox. 2) Skype is being connected to through the cable modem on the source side and through a broadband card on the laptop side. 3) Tested skype in preparation for round 2 and there is practically no delay in video stream using broadband card. |