Camera for chicken coop w MotionEyeOS on Raspberry Pi?

[PJO]

I have been using MotionEye on a Raspberry Pi in my chicken coop for some time. 

It's connected to my home LAN via Cat5 cable and serves several purposes: I can see if

1. All the chickens are in at night without going outside and down the garden. (They have an automatic door that shuts at night, but occasionally one gets shut out)

2. There are any eggs to be collected.

&

3. There's any question about who laid an egg: a photo taken by MotionEye every 5 mins provides an answer (our chickens look more different than their eggs!)

The camera is a Pi NoIR v2.1 80cm (32") above the roost bar; distance to the nestboxes is 150cm (58"). I leave it on 24x7. The image above is taken using a $9 infra-red illuminator which was supposed to come one only at night but which also stayed on 24x7 because the coop wasn't very bright indoors.

Pi with homemade gimbal

I would be interested to know if others have done anything like this with MotionEye and if so what they've used and what issues if any they've encountered and resolved. 

MotionEye writes to an NFS file share on my Synology NAS. For photos it works well. Live view works fine at 1080p with about 8 fps. However, for recording video clips (motion-activated recording) it wasn't a success. Clips were shorter than they were supposed to be (typically 7 seconds instead of 20) and very pixelated. Switching from a Pi 2 to a Pi 3 didn't make an improvement. I think the issue might be related to the NAS drives sleeping and their wake-up time, but I haven't experimented with this -- one could write to a ramdisk and periodically copy content off to the NAS. 

My illuminator burned out after a few months and I have a couple of replacement LED rings on order at about $3 each and wlll find a way of powering these separately just when needed (I didn't know MotionEye allowed creation of "Action buttons" for this until I read about recently). As can be seen in the first image the camera's focal length isn't quite ideal; a very slightly wider angle lens would be good. I don't really want to spend a lot on a pan and tilt camera but wonder if anyone has any recommendation on something cheap and cheerful that would work with MotionEye and a Pi in this relatively confined space? (with or without a built-in IR illuminator). Thanks.