As I try to get Operation FozzieCam, sorry, Foscam under way...
... OK, back story. We bought a modest pile of Foscam IP cameras this past summer, choosing these on the basis of being fairly cheap on Amazon and apparently playing nice with ZoneMinder. I think the model number shown on Amazon was somewhere in the 99xx series, though the only model identification on the actual cameras or their packaging is "G2", so go figure.
Anyway. With the prospect of having the house all wired for Ethernet (and PoE in selected locations) in the not-too-distant future, 'tis time to experiment with the planned long-term setup.
ZoneMinder doesn't in fact appear to work with the one I have hooked up on my desk. It displays a field of blue, and shows a frame rate flickering between zero and somewhere around 2400 FPS. Hello?
The Foscam app on my phone can't talk to the camera when it's plugged into the office network, because the phone is connected (via WiFi) to the house network, but whatever. I shouldn't need to use the app.
I find that VLC will display the feed from the camera, using the same MRL (rtsp://[email protected]:88/videoMain) that I was trying to use with ZoneMinder. OK, the version of ZoneMinder that I can install easily on the workstation is kind of outdated, and I should probably be installing it on the server anyway, so perhaps I'll try that later.
Watching on VLC? Looks basically good, except that the H264 compression seems to be tuned for bandwidth conservation, which isn't that much of a concern on the LAN. So, serious motion blur if a lot of things change at once. Maybe I can change the settings from the app?
Take the camera out to the living room, plug it into a LAN port on the WiFi router, and try the app. It still remembers the test camera I'd set up back in Palo Alto, and there seems to be no way to make it forget that. Oh, well. Try adding a camera. It finds it! But then the next step is to name it, and the name change fails with a cryptic message, and there's no way to get past that and poke at the camera's settings or anything. And no way to get back from the "change the name" screen other than doing a force-stop.
Doesn't help that Foscam has apparently had an identity reboot, and the old stuff is no longer supported.
Oh: I can call up the web interface on the camera, from a browser. Yay? Except that what I get is a login screen that complains of a missing plugin, and refuses to do anything whatsoever, to include trying to install the plugin. (This is the case on every browser I tried, though I admit I didn't try firing up a Windows VM and using Explorer.) It looks like maybe it wants Flash, which seems to have been banished from polite society within the last several months. Apparently it also wants to install its own plugin, of some sort.
Back on the phone, there's an alternative app, from OWLR, that finds the camera and allows changing a couple of trivial settings, but I see nothing about tuning the CODEC and suchlike.
Oh, well. The camera does function, and I have a way of retrieving the video stream. It'll be a while, anyway, before the Ethernet is in place, never mind the yard sensor network, the automatic paintball guns for chasing deer out of the gardens, and the giant robots.
Update: Yeah, turns out it needs a Windows-specific plugin. Maybe there's a Mac version too. The web interface does work with IE on Win7... after insisting on installing some mystery addons from China, oog. Then it insists on having passwords set, and doesn't like null nor trivial passwords - come on, guys, these are going to be hard-wired and behind a firewall, with no contact with the Internet at large. Then... turns out that there are interesting settings, but they vary from one camera to the next, on account of the cameras not all having the same firmware version installed. So, update the firmware on all of them (two done so far). Update firmware, set for HD mode, 15 FPS, 2 Mbit/sec (as long as it's well under 10, I can get away with using an 8-port, 100Mbit PoE switch without even gigabit uplink, and all should be well).
So, gotta run through this with all the cameras. And stick labels on them. Meanwhile camera #01 now feeds a decent-quality 1080P stream to VLC.
Update 2: Yes, installing the newer ZoneMinder on the baby server (Debian 9) does solve the "doesn't work" thing. Looks like it works properly, even. But... looks like each zmc instance is using a bit over 1/3 of a CPU core (it's a cheap little AMD A8-5545M, not very fast but there are four cores, so it should be able to handle a few cameras - it was never meant to do video processing; I set it up as a file/print server and network gateway).
So: this looks promising now. if we're really going to be running ZoneMinder on a bunch of cameras, I guess I either set them to 720P instead of 1080P, or get a bigger server - maybe one of those used rackmount Real Servers with a dual-many-core Xeon setup that turn up cheapish on Newegg and Amazon.
And, since these'll be on Ethernet rather than WiFi, I guess I should round up a set of SMA jack covers to keep dust, bugs, and weather out of the antenna connectors once they're outdoors.
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