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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.
> 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.
Now, a piece of anecdotal reality to show one or two things to some pundits.
A friend of mine is a remarkable engineer (a Mechanics graduated one, more exactly). He's even respected in our line of work because he can deal with the intricacies of some calculations.
Very well, some dog poop had been appearing in front of his house gate for some time and he get very upset at the dog's owner for not being civilized and picking up the dog's feces.
Since he was planning to buy a camera for security purposes, and since I helped him with a small netbook on which we put a Xfce-based distro, he asked my help to buy a Linux-compatible camera and later configure the access to it.
A few day later I asked if it was still working and what he did about the pooping at his gate.
He told me that strangely a lot of days went by without any poop appearing again; he thought the camera was seen and might have prevented the dog's owner from letting the dog stop there.
Then, he told me, one day it happened again. There it was the clear image of the feces. All he had to do is look at the saved footage. He started looking at one hour earlier, then another hour and son until he came to a point where there were no feces shown. Then he started to scan the video forward until a little dog appeared at distance. It came alone, did its dog thing and went away happy. There wasn't a dog owner, it was just a street dog.
Next time you start mumbling about technicalities, remember reality can be a lot more cruel than you can imagine.