What's needed to make video surveillance on the web?

April 24, 2012 6:46 AM

How do I make our surveillance cameras available to the public over the web?

I recently "inherited" a project I did not want, maintaining a video camera surveillance system of our town's main street areas. Now the "higher ups" want to make these feeds available on the web to the public.

This is a project I was not asked to be involved with until it was set up so I am not very familiar with the inner workings but of course have to figure it out now! The previous person that managed this project has recently left to work somewhere else. As I understand how it is set up there are 6 IP cameras hooked to a hefty Windows XP computer running Video Insight. The PC is located at our town's police department dispatch office for monitoring the downtown area. The police department views it all internally, there is no internet connection to the video server - XP machine, so I know that much is needed at least!

Now my boss(es) want to make the feeds available to everyone via the internet either on our website or a standalone website. They don't want any of the recorded (DVR'd) footage available, however. As I read the documentation for the software
documentation for the software here it appears there is some mechanism built into Video Insight for making available to the web, but it's not clear to me how this can be incorporated into another website, etc. Also, I wouldn't think you'd want the monitoring XP machine to also be the web server for the public?

I'm still trying to wrangle whether we have a support contract with the company that installed all this and whether they can help, but wondered if anyone here has experience setting up something like this up to give me a better idea of what is needed.

posted by bellastarr to computers & internet (2 answers total)

I don't know specifically about VI, but I was a tech at another video surveillance sales company. Most of the software doesn't give you an option to embed in a page; they're usually proprietary codecs/containers that require a driver download (and/or a software player) to view. This makes it difficult or impossible to embed in a web page.

Unless it's one of the higher-end setups (Geovision is one that I've worked with that was a "nice" one), you're pretty much stuck with exposing a port on the host machine.
posted by chrisfromthelc at 7:00 AM on April 24, 2012

I did this recently with one of those stand-alone security DVRs. After a little bit of packet sniffing while using the client software that came with the device, I found the individual RTSP streams used to transport mjpeg video over the network. From there I put together a couple bash scripts using openRTSP and ffmpeg to poll the device every few seconds, grab a frame of video (the fact that the video was mjpeg made this easier), then save it to a file for a webserver to serve up.

It wasn't a great solution, but it did the job and sufficiently insulated the actual security system from the outside world while still allowing some access.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:11 AM on April 24, 2012