I am looking into getting a (at least) 4 channel DVR for the house, mainly for outside doors and whatnot. But it’s hard to find a system that will give me direct access to an image url. The system I have been looking at is Samsung SHR-1041K. Does anyone have any input on a decent DVR or one that is definitely accessible from Vera and the computer, I would prefer to be able to access recorded video from the computer as well.
Did some more digging on the samsung dvr’s. They use RTSP protocol for the video, does anyone know a way to grab it as a still image using vera? Only other problem I forsee with it is the initial login, but i’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
My best guess would be to use Mplayer (not sure if it supports RTSP) or VideoLan VLC to connect to the steam and then “grab” images and store them on a local web server which you can then have Vera fetch. Using MPlayer is a popular method for grabbing snapshots from older Linksys cameras and others that don’t offer a JPG Static Image URL.
You can find out more about how to use Mplayer at the Linksys forums under camera’s, but I dont know if it supports RTSP as I know VLC does…
Unfortunately, there seems not to be either RSTP or mplayer packages for OpenWRT.
Without these, it’s very unlikely you’d be able to pick frames from a realtime stream directly on Vera (and I seriously doubt the embedded processor is up to the task).
If the DVR can’t provide a JPEG feed, the only remaining solution would be to create one on a desktop computer.
[quote author=javier link=topic=3567.msg17360#msg17360 date=1273087091]
the only remaining solution would be to create one on a desktop computer.
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That’s what I meant too, looks like you need to run a separate computer/PC/Laptop for this. I use an HP home server that’s very low wattage and that does all my NAS/data and AV storage, remote access and also has some scripts to snatch JPG snapshots from some old cams and plop them into a directory served up by the integrated IIS server. It also acts as an FTP server for motion alerts and plops all those into a directory. One little machine can do lots of menial tasks and not waste too much electricity doing it.
Hrm, I may be able to do that, planning on getting a WHS eventually anyways.
I found where they have demos online of the web interface, will have to see if I can get VLC to grab it.