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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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)
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
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....
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
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Keep making stuff.
Thank you!
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
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
https://liveworld.info/cam/seattle-sea-otter
Started watching the Sea Otters in the Seattle Aquarium. 10/10 would 'awww' again.
ha thanks. the sea otters cam has been the personal favorite too, its up on my second monitor half the workday
Missing this one: https://www.youtube.com/live/ydYDqZQpim8?si=YfuIXAI7N-zy_XTv
in. thanks. if you spot others just drop urls, submit button is bottom-left on the site or ping me here
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)
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.
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
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....
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
Have you used Earthcam? It does a pretty good job of this.
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
You have Toronto, Ontario under Ontario Airport in California. As well as Hamptons Cam in Long Beach, I think.
Dublin, Ireland lists Duluth Canal Cam as a live cam which is wrong.
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!
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
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
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
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
what a horrible website with such claims
flagged for obvious lies in title
I like the interface. Keep building the interface. How will you monitor camera uptime? Maybe include a rating system to the camera icons.