You all bring up excellent points, thank you very much. Some specific responses to questions that were posed:


Good point. Indeed such a scheme would likely work to solve the problem. However I don't think I can spend that level of complexity and CPU usage on my little Synology NAS. It frequently gets asked to do more intensive things like transcode video streams on the fly, and I don't want to make that job harder by filling its little head with a massive VM/browser implementation just for this.

I'm hoping to find a command-line equivalent that will work in a bash script. I believe that Wget isn't functioning here because it merely downloads the page's initial HTML and doesn't execute any javascript or load any media files. If I could figure out which bit of the YouTube HTML code points to the "thing" that I need to load to get this thing to "trigger" so that YouTube does the right thing, I could do that. I just don't know what that "thing" is.



Excellent question. It's the most popular video platform, and I want the video to be easy for us, and anyone else, to find. My long term goal is to improve the camera stuff and improve the feeding stuff so that the stream is actually interesting for more hours during the day and maybe some folks besides us would like to watch it.

I'm also using it as a testbed for learning how to properly manage video streams, trying to learn the pitfalls of YouTube itself specifically, so that I could do live concerts from our band which are reliable. (Many amateur bands I've seen that try to stream their shows have problems getting the stream started and keeping it reliable.)



Whoa, you have a really good point there. That might put the kibosh on this whole idea.