Dear Lazyweb,

The SDI cameras we use for the DNA Lounge webcast are flaky. I think we spent about $200 each on years ago, and they lose their minds with ~100' cable lengths, even though that is well within spec. We've also burned money on repeaters that don't help.

It has come to my attention that IP cameras have plummeted in price: they're like $25 now. So if I can replace all of my cameras with something better for like $400 all in, sure, I'd do that.

Questions:

1. If I configure OBS with 16 RTSP-camera input sources, and only one of them is being displayed at a time, is OBS holding open a TCP connection and ingesting video from one camera or from sixteen cameras?

   Because one HD stream my network can handle. Sixteen, not so much. And if I have to do a cat6 homerun for each camera, then the labor cost makes this project too expensive to contemplate.

2. If OBS does do what I want and re-open the stream to the camera when it is selected, how does it deal with the fact that the "rtsp play" command probably is not sensible enough to always start off with an i-frame?

3. Most security cameras come with 2.8mm lenses, which is far too wide for our purposes. 1.2mm is much better. These specs are incredibly difficult to search for. Can you find me a ~$25 RTSP IP camera that has a 1.2mm lens?

   If I put in literally any search terms at all beyond "rtsp", I don't get better results but the price jumps from $25 to $100+.

Previously, previously, previously.