feat(cctv): add 316 publicly broadcast webcams

[meijbaard]

The Netherlands was 26 pins on the map: the Rijkswaterstaat motorway cameras that netherlands.ts fetches, and nothing else. No harbours, no coast, no city centres.

Meanwhile a harbourmaster in Harlingen, a golf club on Ameland and the city of Maastricht each put a camera on the open web and left it there. This adds 229 Dutch cameras and 87 abroad — open data that had no catalogue, which is the only reason it was missing.

Where these come from

Every camera here is broadcast publicly by whoever runs it, on their own site or their own channel. What the web lacks is a catalogue of them, so they were gathered by reading a public index of such cameras — a list of pages, not of feeds, across 383 different hosts, with no coordinates and no stream URLs anywhere. The work is reading those pages and deciding honestly which ones OSIRIS can show, and how.

The index is credited in the README; see ## Acknowledgements.

	count	how it plays
YouTube	209	external_url at the channel's /live
link only	94	external_url alone
HLS	10	stream_url + stream_type: 'hls'
iframe	3	provider embed page

The YouTube group needs no new resolver code. The index links to a channel's /streams tab — a list of past broadcasts, which parseYouTubeUrl reads as nothing at all, so those cameras would silently never play. Rewritten to /live they become live-channel, and /api/cctv/resolve already answers what is on air. Nothing is baked: these streams run for months and come back under a new video id after every restart, which is exactly the case that route's header describes.

The HLS group needs no proxy entry. These are one Wowza platform shared by a family of Dutch webcam sites, and streamlock.net sends Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, so they play straight from the browser. ALLOWED_HOSTS in proxy/route.ts is untouched.

Why 94 carry a link and no stream

Some of them have to: the playlist is locked to the operator's page by a Wowza token that expires inside twenty minutes, or by a Referer check the browser cannot satisfy from here. Baking either would ship a URL that is already dead when somebody clicks it.

But 47 of them have a perfectly good token-free playlist and link out anyway. Sixteen of the nineteen sites in that Wowza family answer an ad-blocker by replacing the camera with a notice — the advertising is what keeps them online, please switch the blocker off. Replaying their playlist here does the very thing that notice objects to: takes the picture and leaves the page, and the advertising on it, unloaded. That those playlists happen to carry no token is an accident of how each site was set up, not permission.

So only the three sites that ask nothing of their visitors are played in place, and the rest are pins with a way through to the operator. AD_WALLED_HOSTS in the generator records which sites and why; the test guards it from the other side, with an allow-list of the three rather than a block-list of the sixteen, so a regeneration that quietly starts replaying somebody else has to fail a test first.

external_url always points at the operator who runs the camera.

What is left out

• 411 long-tail links across 354 one-off hosts. A sample of 30 gave 6 usable feeds; the rest are JS-rendered players, nested iframes, or hub pages. Per-site work with a high chance of breaking quietly.
• 58 links that name a country but no place — mostly aggregator channels (Virtual Railfan, EarthCam, PTZ TV) that cycle through dozens of locations. A single pin would have to lie about where they are.
• The 26 Rijkswaterstaat cameras the index also lists. netherlands.ts already fetches those live.

Coordinates

Resolved through Nominatim, country-filtered, cached in scratch/public-webcams-places.json so regenerating never asks twice. Dutch cameras are looked up on their caption first — Sint Servaasbrug, Maastricht puts the pin on the bridge — and fall back to the village centre.

The foreign captions needed reading once by hand: Nominatim answers 3 in 16 of them raw and 9 in 9 given the place name, so Kransjka Gora → Kranjska Gora and Soi Buakhao, Pattaya Live → Pattaya live in the generator, where they can be reviewed.

Registration

Four keys in RAW_REGION_FETCHERS, split the way world-live.ts is — one worldwide key would make every bounds query fetch every camera. Bounding boxes are drawn round what the arrays actually hold, so the Canaries at 28N and Nordkapp at 71N are both European here.

Registered in RAW_REGION_FETCHERS only. Worth flagging while you are in here: netherlands is registered there and called from fetchEuropeCameras, and GET concatenates regions without deduplicating on id — so every Rijkswaterstaat camera currently lands on the map twice. Measured: ?region=netherlands,europe returns Rijkswaterstaat: 52, with all 26 ids appearing twice. Sent separately as #329 rather than mixed in here.

Verifying

npm test                                                            # 557 passed
RUN_LIVE_TESTS=1 npx vitest run src/app/api/cctv/public-webcams.test.ts
npx tsc --noEmit
curl 'localhost:3000/api/cctv?region=public-webcams-nl' | jq .total  # 229

Checked against a running instance: a viewport query at Harlingen picks up public-webcams-nl and public-webcams-europe, /api/cctv/resolve turns a channel link into a playable embed, and the map's cctv source carries all 316 with their coordinates and stream types.

npm run lint runs out of heap on this repo before and after this branch, so I could not use it as a gate. eslint on the changed files reports nothing new — route.ts has the same 29 pre-existing findings on master.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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