Multi-site Camera installation w/ single site viewing dashboard

[roechas]

Hi All,

I've been pondering a way to setup a single camera at multiple locations and then be able to view them on a single dashboard based website.
Anybody know a good method to do this? Basically I want to setup a camera at 4 family members houses. Then have a webpage where we can all monitor the cameras.

I currently have Blue Iris system setup at my house with mostly Hikvision cameras.

 

[bp2008]

The tricky part is avoiding wasting bandwidth when nobody is watching. Years ago I built an app which can do this but I no longer maintain it, and it isn't very good by modern standards.

You can add all the cams to one Blue Iris instance but this uses a ton of bandwidth even if nobody is watching, so you shouldn't do it if you have limited bandwidth or any kind of data cap.

However you end up doing this, make sure you do not have any wide-open port forwarding to cameras!! How to Secure Your Network (Don't Get Hacked!) It is safe to do a port forward to a camera only if you can limit the source addresses which are able to access the forwarding rule. Many routers do not have this capability unless you install third-party firmware.

 

[roechas]

The tricky part is avoiding wasting bandwidth when nobody is watching. Years ago I built an app which can do this but I no longer maintain it, and it isn't very good by modern standards.

You can add all the cams to one Blue Iris instance but this uses a ton of bandwidth even if nobody is watching, so you shouldn't do it if you have limited bandwidth or any kind of data cap.

However you end up doing this, make sure you do not have any wide-open port forwarding to cameras!! How to Secure Your Network (Don't Get Hacked!) It is safe to do a port forward to a camera only if you can limit the source addresses which are able to access the forwarding rule. Many routers do not have this capability unless you install third-party firmware.

I appreciate your response. You bring up a good point about bandwidth. A couple of my family members live out in the boonies and have slow internet, so I would hate to have a camera streaming 24/7.
I wonder if I could make a local HTML page and have code to view the 4 cameras when they have the page open. I wonder if there are any cameras that have an API I could connect to using HTML code.

 

[bp2008]

You would probably run into issues with authenticating with each camera.