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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.
The panasonic ones are fairly decent. They can be had really cheap too, as long as you don't get in the view of the camera itself when you're obtaining them...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"Build a Raspberry Pi Webcam Server in Minutes"
http://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-webcam-server/
Do you mean ActiveX?
Hikvision.. Very cheap on alibaba.
No idea why an IP camera would require DirectX, but some of them do have web interfaces that require ActiveX, but you only need that if you actually want to use the web interface to view the video. Most IP cameras (certainly including Axis, I'm not familiar with the others on your list) also implement RTSP, and H.264 is pretty standard, so you can view the streams using e.g. VLC player.
I've had great luck with the modules from Leopard Imaging. They have a REST interface for configuration and stills. RTSP works perfectly with clients like VLC. Nice range of lenses. Designed to be embedded. Sweet.
While I can't speak for "most", the limited experience I have had with IP cameras is that the stream coming off many of them is a bone-standard MJPEG stream. That is simply a stream of JPEG images, and any app that can interpret them should be fine. Microsoft has actually published a very small demo program, based on dotNet 4, that displays the output from a webcam.
Rosewill's webcam, by the way, uses a Java applet normally to show what's coming off the camera. I don't believe they use DirectX, or ActiveX, as the image output shows up fine on Firefox.
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.
Firstly I assume you mean ActiveX and that your gripe is the streaming system used by the cameras which requires plugins to use a browser. Have you dug into the operation of any of the cameras? Some of them may provide other interfaces not documented or immediately obvious from their default web interface. For example: My cheapo Chinese Foscam PTZ camera requires ActiveX on the web interface, but the video stream is available via http://w.x.y.z/videostream.cgi... and that spits out a rolling JPEG (I think, I can't remember) stream which does not require any browser plugins.
I came across this while setting up my next suggestion: Zoneminder.
If you have a server located somewhere then I suggest you centralise the security camera management via some program like Zoneminder. This will allow you to capture data from multiple cameras with multiple interfaces and multiple vendors into one common platform. This common platform can perform things like motion detection, recording, and can even control a wide range of model's PTZ functions.
Basically an opensource solution presenting a front end to your closed source cameras.
Raspberry Pi 2 model B does hardware based h.264 encoding when used w/ their camera (options exist with/without IR filter). This results in about 3% CPU utilization on a RPi 2 model B. This encoding can then be piped to VLC. Once in VLC, the options are pretty endless.
Here's a real-world command that pipes the camera to VLC which makes it available via HTTP:
raspivid -t 0 -w 1920 -h 1080 -fps 25 -b 2000000 --exposure night -o - | /usr/bin/cvlc -I dummy --live-caching=500 'stream:///dev/stdin' --sout '#standard{access=http{user=youruser,pwd=yourpass},mux=ts,dst=:8080/}' :demux=h264 --sout-keep &
A key advantage of a RPi is the flexibility, versatility, updatability afforded by both the open hardware and the linux operating system.
~$35 for a RPi 2 model B, ~$25 for a camera. MicroUSB power supply/cable ~$10. WiFi ~$10 (or use integrated ethernet).
I've used a couple of old android phones for this, some old ones from upgrades and old ones friends weren't using - have a look for the app IP Webcam, seems to do exactly what you're after.
Even older phones with ~2MP cameras on the back should be more than enough resolution for this task. The batteries also provide convenient UPS in the event of power cut too.
+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.
It's been many years since I've used Zoneminder, but even then it was better than almost all of the $200 DVR/Camera kits that I've seen.
My sister got one of those kits at Costco and it was a pain to configure, and very limited on it's options/capabilities.
Indeed. Their controller software can do RTSP translation: http://community.ubnt.com/t5/U...
About 4 years ago I came into a business where the security cameras were all older coax models that wired up to capture cards and into a ZoneMinder install. It worked but was cumbersome and I figured it was time to start us getting on IP cameras. We had a new "store" location being built right around the time so I moved everything to IP cameras and ditched ZoneMinder for BlueCherry.
I've never regretted that. BlueCherry is really nice and I see it constantly improving. I don't think I've seen a single new feature introduced in the 4 years I've been using it. Instead they just keep making it better at what it really needs to do. They won't make it limit FPS from a camera. The camera can do that. A timestamp on the image? The camera should do that. Do you want to delete video? Nope. There's no reason for that. The system will eventually cycle it out when the disk is full. They don't work on fluff or things you THINK you need. They work on stability and resource consumption and things that you absolutely need in a video recording system before anything else. I like their approach.
As to cameras I'm not much help. I run about 26 Axis M-1011 or M-1011W (wireless version) cameras one ACTi E33 outdoor bullet camera, and two TRENDNet TV-IP252P dome cameras. I have tried a junk Foscam and HooToo model or two in the past but they were junk and you had to power cycle them randomly to get them back online. A $60 Foscam with PTZ that works MOST of the thing isn't worth anything to me. An Axis M-1011 with no PTZ and smple 640x480 resolution but runs nonstop 365 days a year? That's worth $175 to me. My ACTi E33 has also been reliable for a solid year now and I'm buying more. My TRENDNet TV-IP252P are annoying as hell. They just quit working at random. Their web interface is up, they respond to ICMP pings, but their RTSP feed goes down or borks up bad enough that BlueCherry can't decipher it anymore. I have to powercycle them when I see they're not reading right and I do not like them.
My Axis cameras do go offline sometimes but that's where we power cycle between the grid and generator. We only have a 2 second gap between the two and that seems to catch some cameras in a weird state. Thankfully with them when they go whacky they stop responding to ICMP and HTTP requests to my Nagios install picks up on them being off and I can fix that before it's an issue.
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.
ONVIF is the standard for IP Camera security systems, it handles everything from pan/tilt, video streams, motion detection, removing fish-eye etc.
The trouble with many of these cheap Chinese cameras (Hikvision, Foscam, etc.) is they claim to support ONVIF but are not certified and DO NOT WORK with ONVIF recorders as a result. Sometimes its just one or two features, on mine its pan-tilt, on the first one I bought and binned, it was the HD stream wouldn't connect when the preview stream was running! Making it completelt useless.
So they work with their own (often crappy) interface but try to use them with a big autorecorder box like a Synology raid and they don't work properly.
IMHO, best one I have is a Samsung 95% wide angle PT camera shallow dome camera, waterproof, anti-fogging. The hardware is what makes it great, the software is just the ONVIF standard stuff.