The disclosure is related to adaptive transcoding of video streams from a camera. A camera system includes a camera and a base station connected to each other in a first communication network, which can be a wireless network. When a user requests to view a video from the camera, the base station obtains a video stream from the camera, transcodes the video stream, based on one or more input parameters, to generate a transcoded video stream, and transmits the transcoded video stream to a user device. The base station can transcode the video stream locally, e.g., within the base station, or in a cloud network based on transcoding location factors. Further, the camera system can also determine whether to stream the video to the user directly from the base station or from the cloud network based on streaming location factors.