How to Set Up Your Own Kitten Cam!

So I have this new group of foster kittens that have some health issues. But one is also very, very shy, so I wasn’t sure if he ever came out of the box he was hiding in to eat or play. The obvious solution? A camera to spy on them. And of course, me being me, my next thought was… Can I stream them to Twitch so everyone can see them?

(Short answer: yes. Link at the bottom if you’re just here for kittens.)

I had a couple requirements:

1. This had to be relatively easy to set up and maintain. (No, I didn’t really want to write kitten cam code.)
2. It had to be cheap. Really cheap. That applied to both the camera itself and ongoing costs (ie, no monthly subscription fee).

Researching this turned out to be a complete pain in the butt. So here’s the documentation in case you, too, want to stream your foster kittens.

Security Disclaimer

Is this camera secure? I doubt it. Most security cams aren’t (sorry!). But this camera is being used in a bathroom only housing foster kittens. Sure, someone could hack into it and they could… watch my kittens. Which are being live-streamed on Twitch.

Worst case, they could enable the microphone and listen to the bathroom fan (stinky kittens!). I suppose they might be able to filter that out and hear the sounds of me in my house. I’ve accepted that risk. I’m tragically boring.

But that’s me. Your situation may be different. If I had kids, I might think twice about having anything like this in the house.

Also, if you own an Alexa, your security is already a joke. You might as well set up a kitten cam.

How to set up your kitten cam

1. Get a camera. If your camera is going to be more than 6′ away from your computer, the search term you’re looking for is “IP camera”. Here’s an affiliate link to the one I bought (Wansview Q5). It’s worth the $30.
2. Set up your camera. The Wansview was pretty easy. You download the app, create a login, give it your wifi router info, and then it gives you a QR code you hold up in front of the camera. That’s it.
   At this point, you should be able to view the kittens in the camera app. (And yeah, it wipes out your battery quickly. My phone got hot.) So now we move to the part where we bypass the camera maker’s app.
3. Download and configure the OBS software (free!) to your computer. Watch this video for instructions. He shows three ways to configure the stream — I used the first one (direct streaming via RTSP). In the Wansview app, you can get the RTSP URL under Settings-> Local application -> RTSP. (*** SEE UPDATE BELOW ***)
   When you configure OBS, you will point it at your Twitch account, so you’ll have to create a Twitch account if you don’t already have one. (It’s free.)
4. Hit “Start Streaming”.

That’s it. It really is as simple as it sounds.

*** UPDATE 17 August 2023 ***

After a year of kittens smashing the camera into the bathroom tiles, the night vision stopped working. (Honestly, I’m surprised it lasted this long. Kittens are the most destructive forces in the universe and I never expected a $30 camera to withstand this abuse.) I bought a replacement camera (same make/model) and had some trouble getting RTSP to connect correctly to OBS. The solution:

1. Upgrade OBS to version 29
2. The media source GUI now includes a section called “FFmpeg Options”. Set that to rtsp_transport=tcp  rtsp_flags=prefer_tcp
3. Restart OBS

That solved my problem.

The only other issue I’ve had during the year was kittens chewing through the cable. I replaced the cable with this about four months ago and so far they haven’t destroyed it despite gnawing on it constantly.

Ready to watch some kittens?

https://www.twitch.tv/tm_baumgartner

(Obviously, this will be offline if I don’t have any fosters when you’re looking at this.)