Live Streaming of security cameras

Hi. Firstly, sorry if I may be posting it on the wrong section, I'm not from this line of work. I'm a software developer working on a security solution to a specific matter.

What I need is to know if it is possible to stream the footage of a security camera embbeded in my web software. Even though I know little about DVR's, it's only logical to assume that a IP Camera might do what I need, but before getting into that, I'm trying to avoid it because the target are several places that already have non-IP cameras installed.

The second question is about IP Cameras: can they be used as security cameras? (Recording n-days of footage, etc) and at any given moment that one person (with access) click on a specific link to watch the camera live?

If none of what I'm saying makes much sense, can you point me to the direction to how (if possible) can I watch the images from a camera in real time without using the admin panel that comes with the security camera system? I don't want my users to have to log in into 2 different places to see the cameras.

Thanks in advance.

I can only speak about IP cameras, but I would imagine an DVR is like an IP camera in many ways. IP cameras send video in RTSP and that is not a valid protocol for HTML, I know, WTF.

So if you want to embed video in a web page, you need to have a protocol that HTML supports like RTMP. There's several video servers that do this, the most common in commercial use is Wowsa but I've been happy with Unreal Media Server and some people like VLC, mostly because it's open source.

Can IP cameras be used as security cameras? Well that's the point because analog cameras can't be used as security cameras without something else to process the video. IP cameras do all the processing and have web servers built. You connect to the web server using a browser and you can view live video, some with SD card slots can even record internally and you can view the recordings from the web interface, you can configure the camera and the camera can act on motion detect events, for example if it detects motion it can record, it can send an email, it can FTP an image or video, it can trigger a circuit like an alarm.

You can in theory embed the webpage for the camera in another web page but it's not that easy as it will require the person to log in and install an ActiveX control or a plugin and it will look sloppy with all the controls and menus.

In recent times I've had some frustration with this given that you cannot embed RTSP streams in HTML. Like the above user, yes, total WTF. I hope this changes in the future.

For now, I did a weird workaround, but it seems to work for my needs. I'm not sure if this will apply to you but I figured I'd share just in case it strikes an idea. I have a dedicated desktop in my office specifically for streaming my cameras. This is largely due to the fact when I'm in my office I often have my music at ear bleeding levels (my office is in the basement of my house), so if people come to the door, which is frequent given I live down the street from my parents and within sight of two very close friends of mine, they're easy to miss. I'm a Linux guy, so I'm always tinkering in the Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever world of computing. Given that I had issues embeding the RTSP stream in HTML, I had to look to other means. Last night I got curious about Android, so I installed Android x86 on this computer. I removed the lock screen (feature within system settings) and installed TinyCam Pro + some sort of Autostart app. Now when I kick the system on, it loads TinyCam and begins streaming my cameras. Android may feel a little weird on a desktop, but given this unit has one purpose and one purpose only, it does the job nicely thanks to TinyCam.

FYI if it matters - I've been a long time IP Cam Viewer user, but I cannot seem to make IP Cam Viewer respect the aspect ratio of my cameras, nor can I get it to utilize H264 streams. As a result, I'm sticking with TinyCam for the moment.

In the very near future (as in, probably tonight since my wife and kiddo are away for a few days), I want to look into adding a video streamer to my Ubuntu Server. Maybe then I can utilize a web page, which would be nice for my laptops and whatnot, which right now are just utilizing the individual camera streams via VLC with bookmarks I have set for them.

Thank you for the replies and sorry I didn't answer before. I'm working on two projects right now and I've been with a full place all the time. I'll be checking VLC together with DVR to see if I manage to make offline security cameras available online. I'll make sure to come back and reply to my findings.

About the android solution, I have to credit it to you: smart move, but in my case (enterprise environment is not a viable solution).

I can understand not wanting to use Android. It's a pretty weird workaround, admittedly, but it works remarkably well in my experience so far.

Another idea is to utilize VLC as a streamer. I'm not sure how adept you are with command line related things, but I had a discussion with some VLC developers the other day about running VLC from my Ubuntu Server (which is entirely command line based) to pull in the feeds and offer a stream to clients. That way the stream is being replicated by the server, instead of 10 clients connecting having to pull those 10 feeds from the cameras directly. You can do this through the GUI too, but anybody who works on servers knows that command line is, nearly all of the time, a more bomb proof solution. I haven't actually gotten this working as my honey-do list is ridonkulously long right now, but I intend to look into this a bit further. Given that VLC is cross platform, I'd be willing to bet that it can run from a Windows box acting as the streamer too. This is all speculation though as I haven't DONE this to verify it, but the VLC developers made it sound like it was a decent solution. Given how nice VLC is, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they're right.

Anyway, just sharing thoughts.