[PLUG] Multi IP-camera display - suggestions?

Tom Sharples tsharples at qorvus.com
Mon Aug 31 20:12:31 UTC 2009


Hello, 

We're trying to figure out a low-cost way to simultaneously display the outputs of up to four different brands (e.g. Axis, Sony, Bosch, etc) of IP cams on a single LCD flatpanel attached to an x-86 Linux workstation. This platform can be anything handy like e.g. a low-end Dell or HP. Each IP cam has an embedded web server that allows you to surf to its IP and see live video, but the underlying mechanisms are very different from one brand to the next. Some require you to download a resource-hungry Java or active-X blob, others merely execute in-line javascript or "streaming ftp", and yet others require a multi-step interactive series of key and mouse clicks to get to a live video screen. 

One way to handle this might be using e.g. curl scripts to deal with the preliminaries, and then opening up four individual browser instances, one for each cam, and assigning their video outputs to one of four quadrants of the screen. But this seems pretty clunky and likely to severely bog down system resources and cause random crashes. Does anyone here have suggestions for a better way to do this?

Thanks,

Tom S.



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