Hi All, Advice would be much appreciated!

[ozzywadd]

In short...

I have a need for a camera system that will allow me to programmatically tell the camera to start recording, stop and save to file to be referenced in the future if needed. This is to record every instance of a manual task for quality assurance.

Ideally, this would work with some kind of network cameras and a simple API to communicate with.

Can anybody recommend anything or maybe what I need to be looking for?

Thanks in advance.
Austin

 

[looney2ns]

https://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/allProducts/4502

 

[ozzywadd]

https://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/allProducts/4502

Thanks for the link.

I'm still not entirely sure which product is right for my requirement. I'm a developer with no experience in developing camera systems. I need an affordable product that I can simply interact with via a simple API over a network.

This is literally to do the following: "tell the camera to start recording, stop and save to file to be referenced in the future if needed"

I really wasn't expecting it to be so hard to find a product that I can interact with like this.

Cheers,
Austin

 

[alastairstevenson]

I have a need for a camera system that will allow me to programmatically tell the camera to start recording, stop and save to file to be referenced in the future if needed. This is to record every instance of a manual task for quality assurance.

Presumably what you are actually looking for is not so much a camera to control as a piece of recording software to activate / deactivate?
After all, where would a camera be recording to but an external system that accepts the video stream and either saves it or ignores it?
Almost any camera will generate an RTSP stream that a recording system can request, so the camera is almost secondary.
In my view.

*edit*
Any mileage in the VLC HTTP command facilities described here :
VLC HTTP requests - VideoLAN Wiki

 

[mat200]

In short...

I have a need for a camera system that will allow me to programmatically tell the camera to start recording, stop and save to file to be referenced in the future if needed. This is to record every instance of a manual task for quality assurance.

Ideally, this would work with some kind of network cameras and a simple API to communicate with.

Can anybody recommend anything or maybe what I need to be looking for?

Thanks in advance.
Austin

Hi Austin,

Perhaps a camera with an external alarm signal would be useful.

You can make a raspi or arduino device send an alarm signal to the camera, and that can be used to trigger an action in the camera.

 

[ozzywadd]

Hi Austin,

Perhaps a camera with an external alarm signal would be useful.

You can make a raspi or arduino device send an alarm signal to the camera, and that can be used to trigger an action in the camera.

Sounds like that's what I'm after! Literally, my other option was to build some raspi's with camera modules, this is actually pretty easy to program through a simple interface. Is there a specific camera or feature I need to look for so that I can just send commands to it? As I mentioned before need to trigger a record, finish and save all as separate events.

IMPORTANT: I don't want to use any 3rd party software or interface, I want to integrate this with software my company uses, hence the need to connect a camera I can send events to.

Cheers,
Austin

 

[mat200]

Sounds like that's what I'm after! Literally, my other option was to build some raspi's with camera modules, this is actually pretty easy to program through a simple interface. Is there a specific camera or feature I need to look for so that I can just send commands to it? As I mentioned before need to trigger a record, finish and save all as separate events.

IMPORTANT: I don't want to use any 3rd party software or interface, I want to integrate this with software my company uses, hence the need to connect a camera I can send events to.

Cheers,
Austin

Hi Austin,

I have not had the need to do something along those lines, so the information I have is mostly from what I have been reading here.

Sounds like the alarm signal to the camera is a fairly simple electrical one, then there are rules to set in the camera's natural interface.

I'm certain with some PC based VMS systems you can even do more. Depending on the software you maybe able to trap the alarm i/o signal and run a script or do a special action.

Note, a lot of these IP PoE cameras, while using Linux, the companies do not seem to provide the source code

We do have a few good threads digging more into scripting and coding aspects associated with PoE cameras, so you may want to look into those.
( example Dahua Firmware Mod Kit + Modded Dahua Firmware )