How to publicly display ip cams?

I have a retail store with 21 mixed ACTi cams and their ENR-140 nvrs. I need to display about 9 of them in a grid to customers as a theft deterrent, and I need cashiers to see a grid of 4 important ones. With analog cams I would use splitters and quads, but how would I do this with ip cams?

I was thinking about buying one of those hdmi android sticks, but I found the ip cam viewer app to lag very badly on my android phone.

Search for a NVD - Network Video Decoder or Standalone Video Client. That should suit you well.

Are the cameras ONVIF certified?

Look for an HDMI stick like Android or even an Amazon Fire Stick. These plug into the HDMI port on your TV/Monitor and get power from the USB port on the TV or a USB power adapter if your TV does not have a USB port. They are small, maybe 2-3" long 1" wide. You can use double stick tape to hold it against the TV.

Then download an IP camera viewer app and you can setup a grid of cameras to watch. I use IP Cam Viewer, but may not be available for Amazon but someone here said they used Tinycam with it. The advantage of the Fire Stick is it comes with a remote where the Android stick requires that you purchase that separately.

Don't know of a cheaper way to do it as these devices run about $40.

Search for a NVD - Network Video Decoder or Standalone Video Client. That should suit you well.

 

Are the cameras ONVIF certified?

The cameras are all ONVIF (I believe 2.2) certified. However, when looking for one of these I found an ACTi one online for $450. Are these devices really that expensive, or am I getting ripped off?

Look for an HDMI stick like Android or even an Amazon Fire Stick. These plug into the HDMI port on your TV/Monitor and get power from the USB port on the TV or a USB power adapter if your TV does not have a USB port. They are small, maybe 2-3" long 1" wide. You can use double stick tape to hold it against the TV.

 

Then download an IP camera viewer app and you can setup a grid of cameras to watch. I use IP Cam Viewer, but may not be available for Amazon but someone here said they used Tinycam with it. The advantage of the Fire Stick is it comes with a remote where the Android stick requires that you purchase that separately.

 

Don't know of a cheaper way to do it as these devices run about $40.

I have tried this app on my Android phone (galaxy s4), and it lags like crazy. When viewing even 1 cam it takes around 10 seconds to update the live view compared to the NVR. I have no idea how crazy it would get with the weak CPUs inside those HDMI sticks.

Search for a NVD - Network Video Decoder or Standalone Video Client. That should suit you well.

 

Are the cameras ONVIF certified?

 

The cameras are all ONVIF (I believe 2.2) certified. However, when looking for one of these I found an ACTi one online for $450. Are these devices really that expensive, or am I getting ripped off?

 

Look for an HDMI stick like Android or even an Amazon Fire Stick. These plug into the HDMI port on your TV/Monitor and get power from the USB port on the TV or a USB power adapter if your TV does not have a USB port. They are small, maybe 2-3" long 1" wide. You can use double stick tape to hold it against the TV.

 

Then download an IP camera viewer app and you can setup a grid of cameras to watch. I use IP Cam Viewer, but may not be available for Amazon but someone here said they used Tinycam with it. The advantage of the Fire Stick is it comes with a remote where the Android stick requires that you purchase that separately.

 

Don't know of a cheaper way to do it as these devices run about $40.

 

I have tried this app on my Android phone (galaxy s4), and it lags like crazy. When viewing even 1 cam it takes around 10 seconds to update the live view compared to the NVR. I have no idea how crazy it would get with the weak CPUs inside those HDMI sticks.

Try a fire tv wiith ethernet...if it doesnt work return to amazon...

You can also try a cheap NVR that can pull a separate stream from the camera...otherwise just use an hdmi splitter and display all the streams in each locations.

I have used the Geovision decoder box it is not cheap but you can setup different matrixes of your cameras and has HDMI out. I am not sure how it works with different brands of cameras.

The app likely lags because it's trying to stream the larger resolution. If you have newer ACTi cameras, try setting it up to use Stream 2. Set it for 320x240 (when watching 9 cameras on one 1080P monitor, that's as good as it gets anyway since you are only using 1/9th of the screen for each camera). Also, are using WiFi or 4G, that's not going to cut it. Use an Ethernet adapter with your Android device or Amazon Fire Stick. Then setup the app to use stream 2.

An alternative is to get Intel NUC PC, about 4.5" square, comes with a VESA mount for your TV so attaches to the back. Low power draw, about 10-20W, you can use a small MSATA SSD for software and booting up. Then install Windows. Not sure how the ACTi NVR works, but with ACTi NVR 3 software, you can run the client on Internet Explorer and show the cameras that way. Even then, run ACTi NVR3 software, turn all recording off, set the cameras to use the sub-steam only and run the ACTi NVR 3 client in full screen mode. Software cost is free. With 4 camera, get a Celeron NUC, about $130, get 4GB RAM, about $40, get a small MSATA SSD, 32GB or 64GB or $50-70. The 9 camera setup may need a faster PC, maybe the i3 or i5 NUC.

Search for a NVD - Network Video Decoder or Standalone Video Client.

The cameras are all ONVIF (I believe 2.2) certified. However, when looking for one of these I found an ACTi one online for $450. Are these devices really that expensive, or am I getting ripped off?

Depends on what they do, how many channels they display and at what resolution - you can compare the price with the cost of a PC that can do the same thing. I suppose you need a standalone, non user-interactive solution that doesn't rely on you or others to start some software, power it on, boot it ect...

I've been experimenting with compact alway-on solutions to run 8-10 hours a day, and the Android solutions I've tried have not been reliable over that time frame. I've tried a Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 tablet, a big Acer Android all-in-one, an iPhone, and an ancient laptop, and only the iPhone would work reliably all day, but the display was too small. The others would drop wireless and disconnect (despite being 5' away from a Ubiquiti access point), or the app would shut down randomly and need to be restarted. This was using both IP Cam Viewer Pro and the Blue Iris app.

The laptop ran XP and used the client view for Blue Iris, but was quite old, and would crash randomly. I believe a newer model would hold up better, but haven't tried one. At this point, I'm thinking about about an inexpensive Windows tablet.

If you need a big display, something like what BW suggests is more likely to be stable than the Android devices I've tried, since it's a generic Windows PC. The monitor will probably draw more power than a Celeron NUC. This has the option of letting you run a variety of software, as well as being able to change monitors easily.

The iPads are getting cheaper. They had the 10" Air (not the latest Air2) around for $319 during the big sales which isn't too bad for that sized tablet if it works better than the Android app. They had the original Mini for $199 which isn't too bad. What app are you using on your iPhone that's stable?

When I did the testing, iPads were still pretty expensive, my budget was smaller, and my wife uses hers a lot so it wasn't a good option to take it over for a few days! I'm starting to increase my price range, and now that she has a Surface Pro 3, I may test out the iPad for a few days.

I was using IP Cam Viewer Pro on the iPhone, and it worked great. Kept the phone's display on all the time, stayed connected, and never crashed.

I'm still liking the idea of an inexpensive Windows tablet, but I've got a growing collection of marginal solutions already, so the iPad's probably the next bet.

If speed is not a question. Meaning, if you could live with using Snapshots from the cameras at say 1 second or so intervals and you have the URL's to get those Snapshots from the cameras. Which generally are not hard to find if needed. You can also easily locate many of them using ONVIF for specific camera models vs. hunt the Internet for them.

This could work well. As a deterrent, less bandwidth over the local network and less horsepower for each camera to provide. It makes the point, without the need to use as much resources ("All around") that other methods may require. It also could/can reduce required costs to implement a feature like this.

As stated here earlier. If you could pull smaller Snapshots at 320 resolution, directly from the cameras. You may even be able to get 2-4 FPS per camera.

Here is an example using these methods and 14 live cameras at the same time using 160x120 resolutions.

Using only HTML/JavaScript. The example below. Is interfacing to a web server in this case to get the 14 different cameras images ("Remotely") over the Internet, to be totally secure. It's also adding date/time and custom text and receiving images from each camera of between 1280x720 - 640x480 and resizing them to 160x120.

Which slows the FPS rates per camera down in the example above, because of all of that, extra work and the cameras not being located on a LAN. But you would not need to do all these extra things and could pull the images from these cameras directly from a LAN:

http://107.170.59.150/foscam/FoscamUS.htm

If the device displaying all the cameras has a touch screen or a mouse that can click on any of the cameras individually that are being displayed. One can view, zoom, control specific cameras movement as needed as well. As the above example also demonstrates, for each camera being displayed.

Some of the 14 live cameras being displayed above are fixed cameras and have no PTZ controls or do have PTZ controls but don't have a zoom lens. But, any cameras displayed will support what I have termed as "Infinite Zoom" when they are individually selected. Even if the camera does not have a zoom lens. Allowing you to zoom the cameras current view. Some of the cameras being displayed above do have a zoom lens and support using both the cameras zoom lens and the "Infinite Zoom" feature, individually or combined together.

The above might be too slow for some. But a solution for others. But it's compatible with any Internet browser capable device. You can test the link above with the devices of your choice. To verify that.

The above methods can be used with any IP Camera brand and model that supports pulling images from it using HTTP/HTTPS access methods. Worse case, you can do the image resizing on the HTML/JavaScript browser side specific for each camera, as needed. If you can't pull specific image sizes directly from specific cameras but want all cameras to be displayed at the same time as the same image sizes. By simply adding a width="320" as an example, in any cameras HTML img tag, on the browser side instead. This will keep and maintain the height/width aspect ratio of any camera being displayed.

You can display as many cameras as you wish at the same time using these methods and easily add more as needed.

Don

Thanks for all of the replies. I ended up going with ACTi's in-house solution (ECD-1000), and it works perfectly. If anyone is interested, it natively works with ACTi, Axis, Sony, and Vivotek cameras, and it also supports ONVIF. I've got it pulling 16 cameras at 640x480, 30 FPS and it works perfectly.