The camera used an MJPEG stream through the proxy and the engine's stats under names it does not use (frames/faces rather than frames_processed/faces_seen), so the picture was blank and the counter read zero. The engine re-serves its latest frame until the pipeline produces a new one, so a polled still is the same picture with none of the multipart fragility - which matters when the audience is in the room. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KGcjxF1cNLcuwc3DAPcnfj