IP Cams on Mint 18.3

Say Cheese ?

It may or may not work with your camera though, worth a shot though 😉 ?

EDIT: I think I have got it Wrong. I now see it’s a network camera. You could use vlc for basic functions or something like zoneminder for more advanced features. To be honest and despite what people say I.P Cam software on linux is still a dogs dinner in my opinion.

That is as long as a windows plugin is not needed to view the camera in the browser. Like most of the cameras I have.

Sorry made a stupid typo in my example. The browser address should of course be port 83 and not the port 82 I typed.

Lee is correct that some cameras also use a plug-in, to set-up and control the camera, but often they will also send out a LAN addressed view as well if you set it up. Probably a case for RTFM!

If you Googlefoo it you will see that others have solved rtsp using vlc to transcode the stream. For example: link

This may be even easier (untested)

The other thing you could do although I have not tried it my self is run  what I run on windows “with out a single hickup” contacam. But you could try it in wine. Guide Here.

There is also a few options here but I guess if you have been searching you will have come across it already. Save your self the hassle though. Try and go windows.

On Windows you can actually run the big boy Milestone for free for up to 8 cameras.

It’s still H264 though, we have moved onto H265.

Off to a cattery tomorrow, they want general surveillance at the moment but have already said to quote for an over sized NVR as they anticipate putting cameras into the “cottages”. Pens to you and me, but they advertise themselves as the Dorchester for Cats and very nice it is too. Our cats never wanted to come home.

Just waiting for the day they ask to have them available to customers, they’re own Cat Cam so they can see their loved ones when they’re away. Don’t know how I’ll sort that one securely.

I’ve just thought of a way… but it’s messy. Enable Hik Connect on the camera to allow it to be available over the internet (the feed is encrypted). Create a Hik Connect account for the customer and share the camera with them so they can view it on Android or iOS. After the duration unshare it.

It’s a fully fledged commercial product aimed at businesses but I think you’ll find it reasonably straight forward. Not played with it for ages.

I’m a bit tied up this morning and probably early afternoon. I’ll have another look at it as soon as I can. IIRC it’s in 2 or 3 modules, the idea is the recording server is on another box in your server room. You will need to install all the modules on the same machine. For a handful of cameras it really won’t make any difference.

At the back of my mind you may have to record to a separate hard drive, but it’s installed on my laptop which only has one. May have set up a NAS drive for storage. I forget. We decided that whilst it was very good it didn’t offer as much as our Hikvision products. However it’s massive in the CCTV world and the day may come when we have to deal with an existing installation.

Have a tinker, you can’t do any harm to anything.

EDIT waiting for a crappy HP laptop to reboot after some Windows updates so I’m downloading it to the workshop PC. I see they now have an option for single computer installation, that’ll make it easier.

Recommended you record to a separate drive but not compulsory.

Well that was dead easy. Once I’d knocked back the external camera to H264 it got the feed OK. You set up recordings and other camera settings in the management client.