We were away on holiday last week so I got to try using the Edimax IP camera 'for real' as a monitor to keep an eye on our disabled son - known as 'BenTV-ng' (next generation) to distinguish it from 'BenTV' which was the old analogue system I used to use.
I gave up on using ad-hoc networking and instead took my wireless access point with me. This had the added advantage of improving the range of transmission because I could arrange for the access point to be between the camera and the computer. The computer I used was a Toshiba netbook running Ubuntu Linux.
The first thing I noticed was that when I powered everything up, nothing happened. At first I thought it was because the access point needed to see a wired connection as well as a wireless one, because when I connected the computer to it using a wire things started to work. I soon realised that the range was awful - it stopped working as soon as you were outside of his room. This turned out to be my fault because I had also switched on the analogue camera, which transmitted on the same frequency as the wireless network, so the noise level was huge. Things got better when I switched off the analogue camera.
At first everything appeared to work - vlc rtsp://admin:1234@bentv/ipcam.sdp played the video stream with sound.
I soon noticed that if the network got interrupted vlc froze, giving an apparently good picture, but no movement, which was no use to me. Instead I changed to mplayer - at least if that got into trouble it crashed and closed the video playback window so you knew something was wrong.
I set up a simple shell script that loops indefinitely starting mplayer then when mplayer exits it re-boots the ip camera, waits for 30 seconds and starts mplayer again.
This approach worked pretty well - the 30 second interruptions during the re-boot were not usually too troublesome.
We did find some problems when the video stream only worked for a few seconds before mplayer exited and the re-boot sequence started again, which was no good at all. The only way I found to cure this was to power off the camera all together - a software re-boot via the web interface did not cure it. I'll set up a little test at home now to see how long it takes to get into this state, and whether it makes a difference if you use wireless or wired networking.
The code to achieve this is stored at http://code.google.com/p/ntmisc/source/browse/bentv/.
The most up to date information I have on using this camera with linux can be found at http://ic-3010wg.webhop.net.
9 comments:
Which Edimax model are you using? I use IC-7000PTn. The web video is ok. But the rtsp has no authentication - it is wild open. I noticed you wrote down rtsp://admin:1234@bentv/ipcam.sdp, but for me, the admin:1234 does not exist.
My camera is a IC-3010Wg, but you are right, rtsp authentication does not work - you can miss off the admin:1234 bit and it still works - I have not found any way of switching on authentication, so I think you have to rely on the wireless network security, which is a bit of a shame.
Thank you for your clarification. I am working on a work-around solution. One option is to rely on the router - the same line of thought as you do.
I also noticed there was no official Edimax forum for users to feedback. Please jot down a note in case you have come up with a solution of the wild open problem. In the meantime, I would rather have my rtsp shutdown for security purpose.
Some nice stuff you've done so far. I actually have the same camera and was wondering how to control it with a proper OS. I did try the mplayer command (replacing $host obviously): mplayer -fps 15 -cache 8192 rtsp://$host/ipcam.sdp
but got : Failed to get a SDP description from URL "rtsp://xxxxxx/ipcam.sdp": cannot handle DESCRIBE response: HTTP/1.1 400 Page not found
firmware version of camera is: v1.34 (May 21 2008 10:38:19) and yours?
Thanks for the work though
I am away from home at the moment, but will check the firmware for you when I get back. I think there may be a setting in the camera to switch RTSP support on and off - it would be worth checking it is switched on.
Hi, I have an edimax 3010wg and have been able to work through a lot of the problems using their support on their web site - http://www.edimax.com. Incidentally, you may be interested to know that the camera sofware does NOT work on anything other than IE (I usually use firefox), but I did download some linux software for it yesterday (but haven't tried it).
Good luck
Thanks for your feedback.
You are right about the web interface only working properly with Internet Explorer - that is why I wrote the python script to try to replicate the functions I need.
hi with the newest firmware the cam works with firefox.
This (with or without user:pw)
ffplay rtsp://admin:1234@192.168.0.33/ipcam.sdp
but after some time it start to lag. Any Idea why ?
this site jointly various kinds of camcorders and still provide a lot of technologie with regards to sécurity
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