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Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Open and Affordable IPCams?

Posted by samzenpus on from the all-the-better-to-see-you-with dept.

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.

2 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. DirectX? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Do you mean ActiveX?

  2. I Want One Too! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've got a real beef with the IP camera industry. High cost, large size, relatively low resolution, and the poor interface issues that the OP describes. A 5MP Axis or Hikvission IIP camera will set you back $300 or more and higher resolution will trip the $1,000 mark in a hurry. For a home security camera system that can read a license plate on the street you'd have to spend thousands, probably tens of thousands.

    Yet a Samsung Galaxy has a tiny and great 16MP camera, computer, on board storage, WiFi, cellular connectivity, environmental sensors, and LOTS more in a tiny package for about the same price as the previously mentioned 5MP camera..The only thing they lack is a PoE port and IP66 case.

    There just doesn't seem to be a valid reason for the lack of low cost high quality IP cameras.