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Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Open and Affordable IPCams?
New submitter criticalmess writes: I'm about to give up on any decent hardware to be found to roll my own web-based camera setup around the house and office — and thought that the nerds and experts at /. would be my last resource I could pull out. Having bought multiple IPCamera (DLink, Abus, Axis, Foscam, TP-Link, ...) and always getting the 'requires DirectX' treatment, I'm wondering if there are any open and affordable IPCams out there? I've been looking at BlueCherry and their kickstarter campaign to create a complete opensource hardware solution, I've been looking at Zavio as they seem to offer the streams in an open enough format while not breaking the bank on the hardware. Anything else I should be looking at? I can't for the love of it understand why most of these hardware companies require you to run DirectX — anybody care to enlighten the crowd? Should be simple enough really: hardware captures images, a small embedded webserver transforms this into an RTSP stream or HTTP stream, maybe on h264 or similar — done.
+1
I have a Synology NAS (which is good for many other reasons than cams) and have a D-Link DCS-2132L hooked up to it.
The built-in web interface to the camera did not require any ActiveX, though perhaps it did need a Quicktime plugin on my mac to display H.264. Supports RTP / RTSP/ RTCP but I haven't tried it because why would I? I hate to sound like a Synology who*e, but it's worked great for me out of the box. I'm watching my cat sleep on my iPhone as I type this.
I Use VLC to access all my ONVIF-compliant security cams. Mostly Hikvision, but also many others. The only time I need ActiveX is if I am in the config, and want to play with the zones for motion detection. I do that from a VM or from the spouse's laptop. After initial setup, I never need it again.
I think the original question was poorly worded. Everyone is picking up on the s/DirectX/ActiveX/ part, and then most are giving a big WTF because most cams do (or can be configured to) output a VLC usable stream (MJPEG, h.263, etc). Maybe he really did have no clue about that, but if he used all those cams, he should be well aware that (almost) all of those will spit out a standard stream just fine.
I think you're comment hints at what he's really asking for - an "OPEN" camera that doesn't require ActiveX at all, not even for setup/config. I think that's where it gets tough. I don't know why more of them aren't more open and hackable, though I know the argument will probably be "support", but the cheap ones get returned frequently enough as it is. Edging towards the slightly more expensive side (ex. Axis), it's more stable and has easily configured streams and pulls and pushes it can do, but I'm guessing they'll be keeping as much of that closed as they can cause that's its real selling point. A cheaper, truly open, and hackable version of an Axis would be pretty awesome IMO.