Secure streaming of live video, 24/7, pre-existing camera infrastructure. Can this be done?
October 21, 2010 12:19 PM Subscribe
Secure streaming of live video, 24/7, pre-existing camera infrastructure. Can this be done?
The organization I work for needs to put some existing video feeds online. Think security cameras, although that is not exactly the situation. It is important that this video be encrypted or at least password protected. We are not so much concerned with someone 'recording' video that they have access to, more that we want to keep these feeds out of the hands of those we do not authorize in the first place.
We have a very secure internal network, but some viewers will not be inside, or inside via VPN.
Scalability is pretty important - there are several locations that will need to be hooked up, and each location can have as many as 9 cameras.
Cost is not a big obstacle - everyone involved knows this will cost money, but we'd rather it not cost consultant level money, if you know what I mean.
We've used both Windows Media and Real for other projects in the past, so if there is some path we can take to make one of those work, that'd be great.
The organization I work for needs to put some existing video feeds online. Think security cameras, although that is not exactly the situation. It is important that this video be encrypted or at least password protected. We are not so much concerned with someone 'recording' video that they have access to, more that we want to keep these feeds out of the hands of those we do not authorize in the first place.
We have a very secure internal network, but some viewers will not be inside, or inside via VPN.
Scalability is pretty important - there are several locations that will need to be hooked up, and each location can have as many as 9 cameras.
Cost is not a big obstacle - everyone involved knows this will cost money, but we'd rather it not cost consultant level money, if you know what I mean.
We've used both Windows Media and Real for other projects in the past, so if there is some path we can take to make one of those work, that'd be great.
Whatever you chose be sure you have enough bandwidth to support it. Don't forget to factor over-use. Someone's likely to open up more than one feed at a time and that'll kill upload bandwidth from the location. If you're looking to see more than one feed at a time it might be worth considering a four-in-one screen setup and then digitize from there. That way you'd be feeding four cameras into one video feed (reducing resolution, of course).
posted by wkearney99 at 4:34 PM on October 21, 2010
posted by wkearney99 at 4:34 PM on October 21, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
Open-source video tools like vlc, mplayer, and ffmpeg can often translate a video stream between different containers, e.g. between encrypted HTTP and rtsp or mms.
My guess is that any scalability bottleneck you'll hit will be with bandwidth leaving each camera site. How many different simultaneous stream viewers do you expect to have?
posted by hattifattener at 12:33 PM on October 21, 2010