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Adding IP Cameras

Adding IP Camera

This article will explain how to add an IP camera to Flussonic and show the video from this camera on your site.

First of all, install Flussonic.

RTSP URL

After you install Flussonic, it's necessary to find the RTSP URL of your camera. Usually you can find it in the web interface of your IP camera. Pay attention to the following points:

  • The URL must contain login and password
  • You need the IP address of the camera, which is accessible from Flussonic.

Normally RTSP URL looks like this: rtsp://admin:4321@192.168.45.32/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1. It's important that usually there's some path after the IP address. Your camera won’t stream without it.

Some cameras include a login and password in the URL, and then it takes the form of rtsp://192.168.0.213/user=admin_password=tlJatbo6_channel=1_stream=0.sdp?real_stream.

Sometimes when the camera is in a closed network, it's necessary to forward ports on a router. In this case, the IP address and port of the web interface are not equal to the IP address and port of your camera. Some cameras handle this situation incorrectly, and may offer you an RTSP URL that contains an internal IP address. In this case, it's necessary to replace the address and port with external ones.

So, please note that only the IP address of the camera isn't enough, you must specify a correct and accessible RTSP URL.

Adding a new stream

Now you need to create a new stream in Flussonic.

If you are editing configuration file, you should add:

stream cam1 {
  input rtsp://admin:4321@192.168.45.32/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1;
}

After that run the command:

service flussonic reload

and the Flussonic web interface will show this camera. If the URL was entered correctly, the web interface will show a lifetime count (time that constantly increases). After some time, a bitrate of the stream will appear.

Video output to a website

Flussonic supports many different protocols that allow to get a video. There no one universal was to display video on all types of devices, so to simplify user's life, for each stream we generate an HTML page with a corresponding video player.

The recommended way to add video to a website is by adding iframe to the HTML code of your website:

<iframe src="http://flussonic-ip/cam1/embed.html" frameborder="0" style="width: 640px; height: 480px"></iframe>

After adding this line, you will immediately get a video player on the page where you added it. This video will be directly streamed from Flussonic, that is, it by no means passes through the site's hosting itself.

Adding JPEG thumbnails

In this configuration any user will see only black player with the Play button. To show the last thumbnail of the stream, you need to turn on the option thumbnails to obtain thumbnails:

stream cam1 {
  input rtsp://admin:4321@192.168.45.32/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=1;
  thumbnails;
}

After that the fresh thumbnails will be available at URL like this: http://flussonic-ip/cam1/preview.jpg, and users will see this thumbnail on the site alongside with the Play button.

Adding old MPEG-4 cameras

We do not recommend using old MPEG-4-only cameras.