6 ms·

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

41 points by harisingh1612 15d ago

harisingh1612 15d 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 15d 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 15d 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
- CommieBobDole 15d 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 15d 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
    - DANmode 15d ago
      Keep making stuff. Thank you!
      - harisingh1612 15d ago
        thanks man, appreciated
  - harisingh1612 15d ago
    [dead]
- softboyled 15d 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 https://liveworld.info from extracting canvas data because no user input was detected
  - harisingh1612 15d 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
Vakaiser 15d ago
https://liveworld.info/cam/seattle-sea-otter https://liveworld.info/cam/seattle-sea-otter Started watching the Sea Otters in the Seattle Aquarium. 10/10 would 'awww' again.
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  ha thanks. the sea otters cam has been the personal favorite too, its up on my second monitor half the workday
senordevnyc 15d ago
Missing this one: https://www.youtube.com/live/ydYDqZQpim8?si=YfuIXAI7N-zy_XTv https://www.youtube.com/live/ydYDqZQpim8?si=YfuIXAI7N-zy_XTv
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  in. thanks. if you spot others just drop urls, submit button is bottom-left on the site or ping me here
defrost 15d 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 15d ago
  [flagged]
  - defrost 15d ago
    No drama, will do if I get the free time. You might like to try your luck asking in /r/Australia or searching for already existing cam lists. Spinning globe apps are always fun to, uhh, spin up - it's getting good and near complete data sets to layer on that often poses the real last mile challenge. All the best.
    - harisingh1612 15d ago
      [dead]
xnx 15d 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-camera-fixed-view-diamond-y28qu7 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 15d 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
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [dead]
grogenaut 15d 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 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 15d 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
tolidano 15d ago
Have you used Earthcam? It does a pretty good job of this.
- harisingh1612 15d 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
dumbmrblah 15d ago
You have Toronto, Ontario under Ontario Airport in California. As well as Hamptons Cam in Long Beach, I think.
- harisingh1612 15d ago
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- harisingh1612 15d ago
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s_dev 15d ago
Dublin, Ireland lists Duluth Canal Cam as a live cam which is wrong.
- harisingh1612 15d ago
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- harisingh1612 15d ago
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ceautery 15d 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!
- harisingh1612 15d ago
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- harisingh1612 15d ago
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jedbrooke 15d ago
23 live streams at null island [0] :) cool idea, I like the round globe too, now with 3D rendering in the browser being trivial on modern devices, there’s no excuse for choosing compromising 2D projections of the globe. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [dead]
MikeNotThePope 15d ago
Missing Lukla in Nepal. Where is the claim to be every live camera coming from? This looks like dozens, not a lot more than that. WEBCAM NEPAL LIVE: LUKLA AIRPORT - LIVE STREAMING FROM HIMALAYA LODGE LUKLA, SOLUKHUMBU, NEPAL - https://www.youtube.com/live/am9KDRSZQ-0?si=IjVDTSU_IZ418fyT https://www.youtube.com/live/am9KDRSZQ-0?si=IjVDTSU_IZ418fyT
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [flagged]
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [dead]
- slacktivism123 15d ago
  You're asking Claude so expect a Claudish answer. Lowercasing the text and removing a few periods does not obfuscate the fact that it is Claudespeak. And that is why most of OP's comments are being auto-flagged by HN's slop detector, which you can see if you turn on showdead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated
  - harisingh1612 15d ago
    [flagged]
AlisaYoki 15d ago
[dead]
Markoff 15d ago
> Every yeah right, TIL in Czechia there are only 3 live cameras and in Slovakia and Hungary zero found immediately one in Bratislava https://youtube.com/watch?v=SXt2_-luUr8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=SXt2_-luUr8 what a horrible website with such claims flagged for obvious lies in title
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [dead]
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  update, petrzalka cam is in and live at https://liveworld.info/cam/petrzalka-train-station-live-stream-bratislava-slovakia-sxt2_- https://liveworld.info/cam/petrzalka-train-station-live-stre... got a proper bratislava pin now. still workin on the czechia/hungary side, next batch shd land those. thanks for the push
burello 15d ago
I like the interface. Keep building the interface. How will you monitor camera uptime? Maybe include a rating system to the camera icons.
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [dead]
woutr_be 15d ago
I have something similar at https://livelane.qubic-ventures.com https://livelane.qubic-ventures.com. Started as a simple weekend project, but it’s becoming quite the headache. All sources are mainly from official government sites, which means many are very unreliable. Some have public APIs, others require registration where it takes months to hear back. I currently have about 30 ingestion scripts that more often than not break down. I then also have an iOS app, but that ships with a bundled sqlite database.
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [flagged]
markolb 15d ago
Nice job! Would be great to watch some nature/jungle stuff realtime ;)
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [dead]
diyzt43bj 15d ago
[flagged]
VCFundedGenYer 15d ago
I know for a fact we have at least 30-50 live weather cameras in my area (Windy.com shows em) and this site shows absolutely none of them. Gotta work on your discovery more.
- xnx 15d ago
  Are they YouTube streams? The LiveWorld site is only YouTube streams.
  - harisingh1612 14d ago
    yeah exactly this. and the 160-cam offer still stands whenever youre ready, hari at sapporosoft dot com works.
    - xnx 14d ago
      Will send. I did a compare and I think about 120 you didn't have.
- harisingh1612 14d ago
  [dead]
iAMkenough 15d ago
Definitely not “every” camera by a long shot.
- harisingh1612 14d ago
  [dead]

41 points by harisingh1612 15d 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 15d 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 15d 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
CommieBobDole 15d 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 15d 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
  - DANmode 15d ago
    Keep making stuff. Thank you!
    - harisingh1612 15d ago
      thanks man, appreciated
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [dead]
softboyled 15d 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 https://liveworld.info from extracting canvas data because no user input was detected
- harisingh1612 15d 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

Vakaiser 15d ago

https://liveworld.info/cam/seattle-sea-otter https://liveworld.info/cam/seattle-sea-otter Started watching the Sea Otters in the Seattle Aquarium. 10/10 would 'awww' again.

harisingh1612 15d ago
ha thanks. the sea otters cam has been the personal favorite too, its up on my second monitor half the workday

senordevnyc 15d ago

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

harisingh1612 15d ago
in. thanks. if you spot others just drop urls, submit button is bottom-left on the site or ping me here

defrost 15d 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 15d ago
[flagged]
- defrost 15d ago
  No drama, will do if I get the free time. You might like to try your luck asking in /r/Australia or searching for already existing cam lists. Spinning globe apps are always fun to, uhh, spin up - it's getting good and near complete data sets to layer on that often poses the real last mile challenge. All the best.
  - harisingh1612 15d ago
    [dead]

xnx 15d 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-camera-fixed-view-diamond-y28qu7 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 15d 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
harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]

grogenaut 15d 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 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 15d 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

tolidano 15d ago

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

harisingh1612 15d 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

dumbmrblah 15d ago

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

harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]
harisingh1612 15d ago
[flagged]

s_dev 15d ago

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

harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]
harisingh1612 15d ago
[flagged]

ceautery 15d 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!

harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]
harisingh1612 15d ago
[flagged]

jedbrooke 15d ago

23 live streams at null island [0] :) cool idea, I like the round globe too, now with 3D rendering in the browser being trivial on modern devices, there’s no excuse for choosing compromising 2D projections of the globe. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island

harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]

MikeNotThePope 15d ago

Missing Lukla in Nepal. Where is the claim to be every live camera coming from? This looks like dozens, not a lot more than that. WEBCAM NEPAL LIVE: LUKLA AIRPORT - LIVE STREAMING FROM HIMALAYA LODGE LUKLA, SOLUKHUMBU, NEPAL - https://www.youtube.com/live/am9KDRSZQ-0?si=IjVDTSU_IZ418fyT https://www.youtube.com/live/am9KDRSZQ-0?si=IjVDTSU_IZ418fyT

harisingh1612 15d ago
[flagged]
harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]
slacktivism123 15d ago
You're asking Claude so expect a Claudish answer. Lowercasing the text and removing a few periods does not obfuscate the fact that it is Claudespeak. And that is why most of OP's comments are being auto-flagged by HN's slop detector, which you can see if you turn on showdead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated
- harisingh1612 15d ago
  [flagged]

AlisaYoki 15d ago

[dead]

Markoff 15d ago

> Every yeah right, TIL in Czechia there are only 3 live cameras and in Slovakia and Hungary zero found immediately one in Bratislava https://youtube.com/watch?v=SXt2_-luUr8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=SXt2_-luUr8 what a horrible website with such claims flagged for obvious lies in title

harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]
harisingh1612 15d ago
update, petrzalka cam is in and live at https://liveworld.info/cam/petrzalka-train-station-live-stream-bratislava-slovakia-sxt2_- https://liveworld.info/cam/petrzalka-train-station-live-stre... got a proper bratislava pin now. still workin on the czechia/hungary side, next batch shd land those. thanks for the push

burello 15d ago

I like the interface. Keep building the interface. How will you monitor camera uptime? Maybe include a rating system to the camera icons.

harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]

woutr_be 15d ago

I have something similar at https://livelane.qubic-ventures.com https://livelane.qubic-ventures.com. Started as a simple weekend project, but it’s becoming quite the headache. All sources are mainly from official government sites, which means many are very unreliable. Some have public APIs, others require registration where it takes months to hear back. I currently have about 30 ingestion scripts that more often than not break down. I then also have an iOS app, but that ships with a bundled sqlite database.

harisingh1612 15d ago
[flagged]

markolb 15d ago

Nice job! Would be great to watch some nature/jungle stuff realtime ;)

harisingh1612 15d ago
[dead]

diyzt43bj 15d ago

[flagged]

VCFundedGenYer 15d ago

I know for a fact we have at least 30-50 live weather cameras in my area (Windy.com shows em) and this site shows absolutely none of them. Gotta work on your discovery more.

xnx 15d ago
Are they YouTube streams? The LiveWorld site is only YouTube streams.
- harisingh1612 14d ago
  yeah exactly this. and the 160-cam offer still stands whenever youre ready, hari at sapporosoft dot com works.
  - xnx 14d ago
    Will send. I did a compare and I think about 120 you didn't have.
harisingh1612 14d ago
[dead]

iAMkenough 15d ago

Definitely not “every” camera by a long shot.

harisingh1612 14d ago
[dead]