The refresh is all handled in your browser, so it’s not touching the SharpTools servers.
It’s more about the servers that you are getting your images from. With Nest, you’re likely paying them for access already, so that may be fair use… it was more a warning for people who might be grabbing images or weather from a third party site. For weather, it’s highly unlikely that someone would need to refresh any faster than maybe once every 30 minutes or so… we wanted to at least warn people that they might be hammering someone’s server who is serving them a free image. And the more you hammer someone’s server, the more likely they are to lock it down!
Edit: Oh, and thanks for sharing your findings on the Nest Camera snapshots!
There’s live playback available when the stream is made public, right? It would be cool to use the JPG snapshot in a media tile and then use the new Open Hyperlink feature in the media tile to open the live stream URL directly when the tile is tapped.
That’s a good idea!
On a less intelligent front, I was wondering, since I’m using the “cover” option for Media Scaling, when I click and it opens could it display the full image, not the cropped one?
But your idea sounds better honestly.
Edit1: ok so that works to put the URL in there under action → Open Hyperlink. But it’s not that nice modal display. Maybe not implemented here?
I had luck digging for web code like Keith_Croshaw talked about. Was then able to set it up as a media tile, used a high refresh rate (I pay Nest a lot, I figure their servers can handle it).
Then was able to hyperlink it off that to the camera feed when clicking on the tile.
Really Cool!
But…
(Let me start by saying I am a Mac guy, sorry)
When I get it all set up on my computer or tablets, it works perfect in Safari.
But as soon as I “add to home screen” and try and open that, the media frame is gone? I can still click it and bring me to the hyperlink.
I figure this is because Safari is storing the refresh link, and it is now gone once in the “home screen app”, but is there any work around?
Sorry if this makes little sense, my lingo is bad with all of this.
Is this using Add to Homescreen on the Mac or an iPad/iPhone?
Apple sandboxes the ‘Add to Homescreen’ browser quite a bit, so you may be right that something unique is going on there. Am I understanding correctly that you used the first approach @Keith_Croshaw mentioned with the public URL with a uuid parameter embedded in it?
The problem is on both iPad and iPhone, and possibly even my Mac.
What I think is happening, if I don’t have the link open, in the browser I am running SharpTools, it kills the “image” on the media tile.
Now that I think about this, it makes perfect sense, I just created a direct link to that open tab.
Is there a work around?
Or am I wrong? I thought I had something cool going, but might be a mute point, I don’t won’t to keep my iPad mounted with full access to whomever might be around.
@Jason_Morris I’ve had an issue lately where I have to open the nest stream to get my tile updating. They must have changed something, or SharpTools changed something unknowingly. It’s no big deal but I agree they should not be skimping on the streaming for the price.
Nest has been tweaking things quite a bit lately, so that’s not terribly surprising. They also deprecated the nexusapi*.dropcam.com URLs from your original post if I remember correctly.
Not saying any of this is malicious intent on their part… they just might not realize some people are using their cameras this way.
Based on Keith’s commentary, have you tried using a Hyperlink to the Nest camera directly in one of your dashboards as a utility that way you can open the page and kick start the session as Keith mentioned and then navigate back to SharpTools to view things from there?
All of this may need to be done within the Add to Homescreen browser window as if it opens a separate Safari window then it won’t keep the session data.
It would be more of a utility than anything, so it could be tucked away on a linked dashboard or somewhere out of the way.
Well I have it set up with a very high refresh rate and is actually really cool!
Again, I would feel bad, but how much I pay Nest, until they allow access I don’t mind bogging down their servers…I know people who run live stream on separate monitors, so I imagine my way is way less of a strain.
My only last request (may already be possible) is for me to click on the tile and just have a zoomed up version. No different hyperlink or anything, just a pop up I can click to make large on my tablet, and click again to minimize?
Go to your Nest account → Settings → under “Video” section, enable “Camera Sharing”. In the code snippet, copy the src link, including the “autoplay=1” in the end.
Please note that this url was deprecated by Nest as pointed out by @josh, so it may not work later.
Head to SharpTools Manage Resource page, select “Media” at top, and create a new media using the link from step3 as the url, check “Enable Autorefresh” and set desired refresh rate. So the camera image will be displayed in the tile.
In your dashboard, add a media tile from the media created in step 4. Edit the medial tile to change the dimensions as you want, change Action(Tap) to “Open Hyperlink” and use the same url in step 2 as the hyperlink, change Link Action to “Open in Modal”. Save it.
Now you should see the camera image in the tile, and it will open the video stream page in the modal window and auto play when tapped.
Per Keith’s comment, you may need to “kickoff” the session to access the image by opening the camera’s link (https://video.nest.com/embedded/live/XXX?autoplay=1) directly first. So, as Josh suggested, you can add a Hyperlink tile to open this link in the dashboard, and navigate back to the dashboard to keep the session alive so the media tile can continuously to access the camera image.
Do you mean you receive the 404 error when using the url in Step 2 in the browser? What is the url you used? (Please make sure to remove the “id” part from the url before posting it.) And did you complete step 1 to generate the publicly shared link?
They also deprecated the 
