Show HN: LiveWorld – Every 24/7 YouTube live camera on one globe

hharisingh1612 about 3 hours ago 22 commentsRead Article on liveworld.info

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Discussion (22 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ceautery•4 minutes ago

I like the idea. As others have noted, some of the map placements are wrong. For example, the Glendale Ohio cam is placed in Glendale Arizona. Easy to patch up, and a fun idea. Good job!

dumbmrblah•27 minutes ago

You have Toronto, Ontario under Ontario Airport in California. As well as Hamptons Cam in Long Beach, I think.

xnx•about 1 hour ago

A comprehensive site like this would be great. This cam is plotted in Chicago which is incorrect: https://liveworld.info/cam/deshler-ohio-usa-live-train-camer...

Some pins also seem stacked exactly on top of one another, making them inaccessible (e.g. Chicago).

I've also got a list of 160 live YouTube cam streams with coordinates if you want me to send them somewhere.

harisingh1612•about 1 hour ago

deshler-ohio-usa fix pushing tonight (its going into the regression fixtures alongside the ones CommieBobDole flagged). stacked-pin dedupe is a real known gap, adding a spiral offset when markers overlap at the same coords. YES please send the 160 cams. email works, hari at sapporosoft dot com, or paste a github gist here and ill ingest tonight. that gets us over 800 in one shot, huge thanks

s_dev•22 minutes ago

Dublin, Ireland lists Duluth Canal Cam as a live cam which is wrong.

Vakaiser•about 2 hours ago

https://liveworld.info/cam/seattle-sea-otter

Started watching the Sea Otters in the Seattle Aquarium. 10/10 would 'awww' again.

harisingh1612•about 1 hour ago

ha thanks. the sea otters cam has been the personal favorite too, its up on my second monitor half the workday

tolidano•about 1 hour ago

Have you used Earthcam? It does a pretty good job of this.

harisingh1612•39 minutes ago

yeah earthcam is the big one. mostly a directory of their own camera network with mixed embeds and a paid api, different product. liveworld is youtube-only which means anyone can embed anywhere and videos stay hosted on youtubes side. also free, no paywall, no login. earthcam is more comprehensive on their curated set, less good if you want to freely browse from a globe view

grogenaut•about 1 hour ago

the site is missing a ton of webcams, and is not great ergonomics currently.

just off the top of my head:

https://www.summitatsnoqualmie.com/webcams all of these are live most of the time

agreed that "every" is a bold claim. I can find more with a google search.

(edit) the site doesn't even let me suggest more. oh wait it does, it'a an almost invisible link at the bottom.

and man the form is annoying... url, email, catoregy, country, lat, lon... why not just right click place webcam done with it... I know where it is on a map, but this makes me go to google maps, find the lat/lon, copy them out, paste them into this other form....

harisingh1612•about 1 hour ago

both fair. summitatsnoqualmie ingesting tonight. submit form: youre right, its overkill. next ship is a right-click-place-marker flow, drop pin on the globe and it autofills coords + reverse-geocodes city and country. only field left is the youtube url. the invisible link is embarrassing, promoting it too. thanks for the honest read

defrost•about 2 hours ago

Every is a bold claim. Aspirational. Good luck going forward filling them all in.

There's a fair few missing from Australia (easily more than 8 24/7 live cameras in Oz). eg: The Kings Canyon Waterholes in Watarrka National Park. (mostly dawn and dusk action)

harisingh1612•about 1 hour ago

fair. every is aspirational, shouldve said as many as i can find. currently 652 cams, targeting the ~2-3k publicly embeddable ceiling. adding kings canyon waterholes now, ping me any other australian cams you know of and ill get them in tonight. appreciate the poke

senordevnyc•about 2 hours ago

Missing this one: https://www.youtube.com/live/ydYDqZQpim8?si=YfuIXAI7N-zy_XTv

harisingh1612•about 1 hour ago

in. thanks. if you spot others just drop urls, submit button is bottom-left on the site or ping me here

harisingh1612•about 3 hours ago

hey HN, hari here. built this over the last 2 weeks solo. figured id share now since HN weekend crowd is a good stress test.

the idea came from wanting a way to drop into somewhere on earth and see whats happening right now. youtube has thousands of 24/7 live streams (nature, transit, airport aprons, urban corners) but theyre scattered across a million channels so nobody finds them. so i put them on a globe.

currently 641 cams across ~60 countries. tap a marker, video plays inline, per-camera chat so you can see who else is watching the same view. free, no login needed to watch, no ads, no tracking.

stack: laravel + reverb websockets + postgres, maplibre globe with osm tiles, runs on a $10 tokyo vps. discovery is youtube data api cron on 200+ keywords + admin divisions, plus scraping the internal youtube search bypass for keyword combos api search misses. currently at 6% of the free youtube api quota.

thin spots in coverage: africa, small towns anywhere, central asia, pacific islands. if you know good 24/7 cams that arent geo-blocked, either drop the url here or use the submit button on the bottom left of the site. i approve within a day.

open to feedback on the map ux, discovery, whatever. happy to answer stack questions too.

Todd•about 2 hours ago

Love the idea Hari. On my iPhone, when I tap a dot, it takes me straight to the camera page. I would expect a popover with a title, etc. and a second tap to go to the camera page.

harisingh1612•about 1 hour ago

good catch, thats a mobile bug. desktop hover shows the popover, tap on mobile skips it and jumps. adding a mobile-only tap-once-for-preview flow tonight. thanks

softboyled•about 1 hour ago

Firefox' Enhanced Tracking Protection breaks the map in a weird way. The Map bounces up and down erratically.

This message piles up in the console:

Blocked https://liveworld.info from extracting canvas data because no user input was detected

harisingh1612•about 1 hour ago

ah interesting, the maplibre canvas needs the tracking permission for tile prefetch and looks like ETP is rate-limiting the calls. will file this. workaround for now is toggling ETP to standard for the site or using a different browser. thanks for the console dump

CommieBobDole•about 1 hour ago

This is nice, but how are you determining the location of a camera for map purposes? Some of them are correct, but there are others that have very specific map locations that are off by as much as a hemisphere - an Ohio one in Chicago, a Venice, Italy one in San Bernardino, Pennsylvania and Ohio in Phoenix, etc.

harisingh1612•about 1 hour ago

yeah those hurt. geocoder is a priority stack: pinned coords in description first, then country in title, then city in title constrained to that country, description last resort. when the description says streaming from ohio but the cam is chicago, we lose. drop the specific liveworld cam urls and ill fix them tonight and use them as regression fixtures. planning a wrong-location report button next