The camera had one job: accept a value and keep it. It accepted the request, returned a success, and handed back something else entirely. Then it did that again, with the same body, and gave me a third answer.

The problem started as a frozen picture where a video should be. A live camera view that renders one frame and never moves is a specific kind of insult — the camera is online, the credentials are correct, the path is valid, and the thing still doesn’t animate. Two causes were plausible: the transport, and the codec. It turned out to be both. The integration handed out a stream URL in a scheme nothing on the receiving end could open, and behind it the camera was encoding in a codec a browser won’t decode without help.