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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/
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.
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.
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.
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.