General IP camera musings over my morning coffee... (was Re: Amcrest w/Video Pitcher)

[James Sentman]

Good morning Tom, I’m glad you were able to get it working! Generally the jpeg refresh is the best way to be compatible with everything, it also uses a lot less CPU time than an RTSP stream so if you have multiple cameras you won’t overload your machine and slow down other things. It doesn’t provide the full framerate of course, but generally you don’t want that in an XTension remote page with 30fps in every thumbnail display anyway. I think it would be useful for me to add a link to the actual camera interface from the web remote pages however. i’ve added that to my list when next I get the code for video pitcher up for some revisions. I also have a way I can increase the framerate available to jpeg refreshes now too which I’ve been meaning to implement. The problem with the RTSP stream is that the quicktime libraries that supported it are no longer supported by apple and by default won’t link into new projects. I have to build VP with a 4 year old version of the compiler to be able to use them and eventually they will go away entirely. So the other option is to implement it at a lower level myself, but thats a “non-trivial” project as they say ;) Hopefully newer cameras will support http streaming which is the only thing that the newer macos libraries support. I can also link in libraries from VLC to do it and some streams can be processed by ffmpeg too. But those things add complications for the user as I can’t legally ship them inside my app, I’d have to provide a separate download, or let you actually grab them out of VLC and insert them into XTension which would break the code signing of the app, or try to link them from a remote location which is possible but disallowed by some of the newer security stuff on OSX and would probably start popping up a warning or something. I’d certainly never be able to get an app into the app store that did such a thing. So supporting RTSP is a PITA.

Generally searching on the camera model or make will bring up links to some of the other DVR type software packages out there. Security Spy on the Mac and there are several decent ones for windows. Some of them maintain databases of what these links are for pretty much every camera out there. You can find the links you need that way. VP is a side project for displaying low framerate thumbnails in XTension and recording the same when just recording in the camera isn’t good enough. Since I don’t charge for it I can’t give it the time necessary to keep a database like that up to date myself. I will be adding native Amcrest support in the not too distant future. For now this should work just fine.

I like the X10 cams (not the smaller “Linked” branded ones they are selling now as they aren’t the same at all and there doesn’t seem to be any way to connect to them except through the companies cloud, I can’t find a local JPEG refresh link to them or any other local resources at all believe it or not. If anybody can find anything out about them as far as connecting locally please forward that to me!) and both generations of Foscam cameras work well with VP and now the Amcrest cameras. I’m really sick of trying to figure this out for every camera that comes along so pretty soon there will also be an official raspberry pi Zero based webcam software image from me that will have everything you need to connect to XTension. Since I’ll be able to tweak the software on the camera and in XTension it will just always work and we won’t have to re-invent the wheel each and every time there is a new camera model. I’ve got a preliminary version of that sitting on my desk looking at me right now and the camera part works great, with good motion sensing support and other nice features that are baked into the standard raspberry pi stuff. You could set that up yourself now and get a superior camera to what is commercially available for a fraction of the cost but without the fancy case. It’s going to take some more work before that is all soup yet though. I have some significant changes to the internals of video pitcher planned so that I can more easily mix old code with new code and take better advantage of the multiple-cpu cores available so it’s a larger project and will take some time and there are a LOT of other fun XTension things on my plate right now too :) Not ever being bored in life is a wonderful thing :) I wish I didn’t have to sleep I’d get a lot more great code written. Alas, so far medical science is letting me down as far as that is concerned. They can keep you awake for several days now but your brain still gets as tired as if you weren’t on any of the drugs and you stop being able to function even though you’re awake… That doesn’t sound like a good option to me so I’m avoiding it for the moment ;) 


> On Oct 28, 2017, at 6:29 PM, Tom Yarmas <tom at yarmas.com> wrote:
> 
> Sorry, I should have searched the list first.
> 
> Turns out Brendan Dowd posted in April with something that worked for the Amcrest cameras:
> I have an Amcrest (can't remember the model, but the command I use is:
> 
> http://192.168.1.204/cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi?channel=0 <http://192.168.1.204/cgi-bin/snapshot.cgi?channel=0>
> 
> Thanks Brendan!
> 

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.machomeautomation.com/pipermail/xtensionlist/attachments/20171029/0c33e09d/attachment.html>