camsnap

What This Skill Does

camsnap is a robust OpenClaw skill designed to bridge the gap between RTSP/ONVIF-compliant network cameras and your AI-driven automation workflows. By leveraging the power of ffmpeg under the hood, camsnap provides a reliable command-line interface to capture high-quality snapshots, video clips, and intelligent motion monitoring. Whether you need to secure your home perimeter with motion-triggered events or simply automate a daily visual check of a remote location, this skill handles the heavy lifting of stream management and codec processing.

Installation

To integrate camsnap into your environment, ensure you have ffmpeg installed and available in your system's PATH. Once prepared, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/steipete/camsnap. After installation, configure your device settings by editing ~/.config/camsnap/config.yaml. To add a camera quickly, you can run: camsnap add --name kitchen --host 192.168.0.10 --user user --pass pass. You can verify your camera connectivity at any time using the diagnostic command camsnap doctor --probe.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for home automation enthusiasts, security-conscious developers, and remote monitoring projects. Common use cases include: 1. Automated Surveillance: Setting up motion-triggered alerts that save short clips to a local folder when activity is detected. 2. Periodic Auditing: Scheduling cron jobs or agent tasks to take snapshots of office or warehouse areas to verify status. 3. Security Analysis: Quickly grabbing a high-resolution clip when the OpenClaw agent suspects anomalous behavior in a secure zone.

Example Prompts

• "Hey OpenClaw, capture a 10-second clip from the kitchen camera and save it to the daily archive folder.",
• "OpenClaw, start monitoring the backyard camera for motion; if you see any activity with a threshold above 0.3, record a snapshot.",
• "Can you check if the kitchen camera is functioning properly? Run a diagnostic probe and take a quick snapshot."

Tips & Limitations

To maximize performance, always perform a short test capture before attempting long-duration recordings to ensure your network bandwidth can handle the stream load. If you encounter issues, the camsnap discover --info command is excellent for identifying network issues. Note that performance is strictly dependent on your local system's ability to decode RTSP streams, so ensure your CPU or GPU can handle simultaneous streams if monitoring multiple cameras. Keep your camera credentials secure within the config file.