More Animated Weather Radar Loops as a Blue Iris camera

TonyR

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First off, please note that in order to display an animated GIF image as a camera, your Blue Iris must be version 4.7.6.2 or above.

Member @beepsilver brought to my attention the quality animated weather radar loops offered by Intellicast as an alternative to Weather Underground. About the only thing I like about WU is that the animation can be more local (animation covers one weather radar) instead of the larger region covered by Intellicast. If Intellicast offers a more local animation I have yet to discover it.

That being said, that larger animated region provided by Intellicast can be a complement to WU and offers redundancy as well, since WU seems to go down frequently. The Intellicast animation will also put up a red X where a weather radar has been reported as 'down', so it's a win-win. I now have a cam configured several days now for the more local Weather Underground and as of today, a cam configured with the GA (southeast) region offered by Intellicast.

The method I used to determine the URL for an animated 'GIF' of the desired weather radar loop on Intellicast is as follows:

1) Open Internet Explorer (you can use any browser that you know how to do this with...I've only done it with IE).
2) Go to this URL: Intellicast - Current Radar in GA - Columbus
3) Go to the dropdown menu to the left under 'Region' and select the desired region to be displayed.
4) Toward the right click on 'Play Animation'.
5) In IE, press CTRL-U or click on 'View', select 'Source'.
6) Insure cursor is on line #1 (start of document).
7) Press CTRL-F or 'Edit', then 'Find'.
8) Type in or copy and paste this into the 'Find' window: 9) Click on 'Next'.
10) The editor should find and highlight the above text; copy the rest of the link to the end which includes '.gif'. Your copied link should look similar to this: Your link may differ from the above depending on which region you selected in Step #3. Test by pasting into a new browser's URL area and hit 'Enter'. If your desired animated GIF comes up, you're good, proceed to step #11.
11) In Blue Iris, create a new camera with 'Video' tab configured as in image #1 below.
12) Configure the new camera as in Image #2 below. You can copy the first part of your tested & working URL above (images.intellicast.com) and paste into the address at top, then copy the second part you found above ( /WxImages/RadarLoop/csg_None_anim.gif ) and paste into the 'Video Path'.
Click on 'OK' and enjoy your new animated weather radar loop as a camera!

Again, kudos to @beepsilver for getting me started on this. I think that @Weather_Junkie , @Cameraguy , @awsum140 , @Mike A. and @looney2ns will like this, too.

Image #1
BI_animated-radar2_video.jpg

Image #2
BI_animated-radar2_config.jpg
 
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Tinman

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Will the animation play in UI3 ? Don't seem to do nothing on mine.

Update: I found in UI3 you cannot have html5 selected. Once I changed the h.264 player setting to NACI auto hw accel then the gif works. This is using chrome for browser.
 
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Tinman

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After some more playing with this I found mine loop is much smoother and faster playing in UI3 with HTML5 seleceted by changing the Max. rate from 12.00 sec to 2.00 sec.wea.JPG
 

TonyR

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After some more playing with this I found mine loop is much smoother and faster playing in UI3 with HTML5 seleceted by changing the Max. rate from 12.00 sec to 2.00 sec.View attachment 30979
Yes, that will refresh the animation sooner and repeat quicker, I had adjusted it higher long ago because Weather Underground did not like that quick refresh, perhaps Intellicast won't mind. I set to 12 as a trial, no sure how Intellicast would handle it. I plan to lower that # as time passes. letting each number run for a week, etc.

Glad you and @Vettester are enjoying this...I know I am!
 

Tinman

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Yes, that will refresh the animation sooner and repeat quicker, I had adjusted it higher long ago because Weather Underground did not like that quick refresh, perhaps Intellicast won't mind. I set to 12 as a trial, no sure how Intellicast would handle it. I plan to lower that # as time passes. letting each number run for a week, etc.

Glad you and @Vettester are enjoying this...I know I am!
You bet, I did notice too that BI gives me a yellow fps warning, so I tried it up the 4fps and now the warning is gone and it is running smooth. So you are right about having to find the sweet spot. Thanks for posting this !
 

Tinman

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I thought I was going to be buying a new flag pole today....never knew it would bend this much. We lost power a few minutes before this footage was taken. Cams will run a long time on UPS but my BI machine is limited to about 45 minutes. This little storm rolled through as I was goofing around with radar loop gif. The town had several trees and limbs down and I lost power for 2 hrs. Nap time :)

 

TonyR

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Wow! Today here we had a few trees down, lots of debris, etc. some lights flickering but nothing like that. Quite a windy, wet mess there.
 

Tinman

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@Tinman
What was the gust recorded by the Vantage Vue?
Your lot is like mine, the trees are protecting you from the brunt of it.
It is a Acurite Pro and the wind gust was 22mph....obviously the wind anemometer isn't worth a crap on this model. LOL I use it for rain and temp mostly as it does a pretty good job on that.
 

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Tinman

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Just a little follow up and WARNING about using the radar loop gif. I found out that mine was burning up over 68GB of data usage a day....so after 6 days I had used almost my whole months data plan amount ! I got the warning from my ISP via browser and thought "No way could that little thing be using that much" So I looked at BI camera stats and was surprised when I saw the radar cam was pulling 790 kB/s. I then found this calculator:

Kilobytes Per Second to Gigabytes Per Hour | Kyle's Converter

Sure enough, I was burning 68.16 GB a day !

I deleted the cam and all went back to my normal usage. I also confirmed it with my router traffic meter. Luckily Mediacom let me slide this time as it was my first overage.

So be sure when you go messing with the FPS like I did you check BI stats and see what it is pulling. I'm just going to stick with my phone's radar :smash:
 

TonyR

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Just a little follow up and WARNING about using the radar loop gif. I found out that mine was burning up over 68GB of data usage a day....so after 6 days I had used almost my whole months data plan amount ! I got the warning from my ISP via browser and thought "No way could that little thing be using that much" So I looked at BI camera stats and was surprised when I saw the radar cam was pulling 790 kB/s. I then found this calculator:

Kilobytes Per Second to Gigabytes Per Hour | Kyle's Converter

Sure enough, I was burning 68.16 GB a day !

I deleted the cam and all went back to my normal usage. I also confirmed it with my router traffic meter. Luckily Mediacom let me slide this time as it was my first overage.

So be sure when you go messing with the FPS like I did you check BI stats and see what it is pulling. I'm just going to stick with my phone's radar :smash:
Can't say that I blame you. I use it only on my BI desktop server, got uncapped DSL anyway, albeit sloooow as molasses in January. On my phone, I use a local network TV's affiliate app for my weather radar.
 

pinko

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Australian Radar animated gifs example (Melbourne)
1.Navigate to the desired state table. Radar Images
upload_2018-10-16_10-31-27.png
2.Find the Australian Radar site (location) you want to use.
upload_2018-10-16_10-32-0.png
3.Click the desired radar view. Note the IDR number in the url.
upload_2018-10-16_10-32-23.png

4.
Use the following setting in Camera Configuration:
upload_2018-10-16_10-38-20.png
5.Set the max rate (fps) in Video settings.
upload_2018-10-16_10-40-54.png

Depending on the radar site the amount of data used ranges from ~35 to ~70kbs
38 Kilobytes Per Second (kB/s) = 3.28 Gigabytes Per Day (GB/d)

Kilobytes Per Second to Gigabytes Per Day | Kyle's Converter

enjoy.
 

meissen

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Just to bump and update this post -- You can follow steps 1 through 4, then in Chrome once the radar is animated, in Chrome right click the image and click "Open image in new tab" - it will open the animated radar loop in a new tab. In my case for Metro Detroit, it was -- I then used this URL for steps 11 and on.
 

tech101

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This is pretty interesting I might look into this soon. Thank you so much for sharing !
 

Cameraguy

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I just went back and enabled my disabled radar and boom it's working again .. weather underground must have updated something
 

JKChad

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Doesn't anyone happen to know of a way to get a 3, 5, 7, or 10 forecast to work like the the radar map. I see I can set the refresh to as low as ever 2 mins. I would love to have a 3 or 5 day forecast on the screen as well as the radar.
 
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