Better webcam performance by running it on separate machine

I had some issues with my logitech c615 on my octopi setup, it stopped working and I realized in my setup I didn't have to run the cam from the pi.. I have a USB over cat6 converter from my PC in my bedroom to the printer in the living room so I plugged the camera into there and setup the webcam to stream from my PC which is mostly always on. cam2web is the program I used on my Windows PC to stream 1080p 30fps for the octopi server. I've noticed much better performance and image especially viewing from my PC, and using hostnames. This allows you to get a good view of whats going on while still able to adjust the focus and white balance. After installation you set octoprint webcam url to http://hostname_or_ip:8000/camera/mjpeg . By using your PC's and octopi's hostname instead of IP you're able to set everything up links or app on phone without having to worry about if the IP's change. Turns out you can also use cam2web on linux and raspberry pi over command line.

I know it's kind of an odd setup but I thought it might help somebody else with a similar setup or used to use a long USB cable from printer to their modeling/slicing computer.

Oh and in case you're wondering this is the USB extender over Cat5 I'm using that works beautifully with my 1080p logitech webcam: AV Access USB Extender 165ft Over Cat5e

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That's cool. It's a bit like my dedicate-a-Raspberry-Pi-Zero-W option I proposed earlier. And yes, it really pushes a fair load off the main Raspberry.

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for this reason i use a low power intel machine -> only 2-4 Watt more and you can run 4 (or more) instances + 4 or more webcams :wink:

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