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The SLV Camera Project Team Needs a Video Expert!

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Christopher O'Brien

Christopher O'Brien

Back in the Saddle Aginn
Staff member
We would like to provide websites w/ a view-only surveillance camera feed from our San Luis Valley camera(s). We need someone who can take our Active-X signal and convert it to .avi (or whatever) so that it can be can be embedded here... Any takers? PM me, pls!
 
Gene Steinberg said:
Or even H-264? AVI isn't native to Macs, and you need a converter.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, the Sony camera's admin functions are all operated through an active-x application. I don't think we can get around this fact. So, we need to convert the camera's signal to a view-only feed so that all the admin functions, i.e., settings, control and other variables are bypassed. Can we isolate and then somehow hi-jack the video feed coming out of the static ISP address?
 
Well, there is Flip4Mac which supports some AVI formats in Apple's QuickTime. Hopefully it'll work. You'll have to get an expect to deal with the rest. :)
 
hi,
First off, do you really have to provide a video feed? You'll incur a larger cost for bandwidth transfers doing this. By all means archive the live feed to a drive for referral later, but can I suggest that having a still image that is updated on say a 10 or 5 seconds basis should be good enough, plus if the connection goes, you'll at least have something presented back to the user.

Have a small form or 'report' button that a user can hit next to the image so if something 'interesting' is seen then a log is created of a 'moment of interest'. These moments can then be reviewed with a date & timestamp for you to check before and after that point at your leisure.

This solution might get you over the hump of at least getting some out there to generate interest and will give you time to get more information on sorting out a live feed if you really need it on the site. You'll also get a very loose indication of bandwidth costs on just transferring an image every few seconds. Most webcams can also be easily setup to push the image to a directory that can be web-viewable - and therefore referenced by other sites for inclusion and also have a copyright or branding applied to it.

just my 2p

Bb
 
Christopher O'Brien said:
We would like to provide websites w/ a view-only surveillance camera feed from our San Luis Valley camera(s). We need someone who can take our Active-X signal and convert it to .avi (or whatever) so that it can be can be embedded here... Any takers? PM me, pls!
Click to expand...

Did you find your solution, if not let me know and I will be glad to help.
 
The ActiveX component stream is difficult to hi-jack. I dont know of a commercial option that will real time convert ActiveX streams (I assume this is in mpeg format??) to another format such as .avi. Though, you could potentially find or have someone crate a java applet that does this. But I think a real time feed is where things could get hard and expensive.

I have some minor experience in porting a surveillance camera to send a delayed streaming feed to an off site recorder. The camera systems software package had two modes. The first was called record mode. This is where the system created things in the mpeg format and recorded in 30 minute increments. Each 30 minute segment was saved as a file with the date and time in the filename. The second was a streaming format that used a Java applet to stream video to another applet installed on the storage server.

I you have the option to store video in some sort of format on a storage server it could be FTP'd to a web server and then converted and streamed easily. Products like MPEG Streamclip (Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows) or Air PlayIt Server (Air Playit - Streaming Video to iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android – Your Personal Audio Video Cloud) are good options. If you can store video in chunks and then automate the transfer, archive, and stream process that is in my opinion the easier and cheaper alternative to trying to go for a realtime hi-jacked video stream.

That said, this is a little outside of my technical sphere. So, I could be wrong. Perhaps there is an option or software solution I don't know about.
 
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