Integrating IP cameras

Owned by Wolfgang Granzer
Last updated: Sept 02, 2024
3 min read

There are various IP cameras from many different manufactures on the market. Since there is no common standard to integration IP cameras into third-party user interfaces, some considerations and requirements must be taken into account.

Web interface

In our visualization you can integrate web content use the Internet / Multi-Internet control or you can show web content in a separate web view. This means that you must specify the URL of the web content that shall be integrate.

For IP cameras this means that the camera must provide a web interface which can be shown. Most of the cameras are providing such a web interface. Here is an example of the web interface of an Axis camera.

image-20240902-063748.png

This web interface can be used in our visualization.

As you can see, the full web interface is shown – including a menu bar and several control elements. If you would like to see only the image stream without extra elements, you have to use a different URL.

Some IP cameras are provided dedicated URLs that provide such streams. Important to note is that these streams can be shown in a normal web browser (e.g. Google Chrome) – without any additional software or plugins. E.g. rstp:// URLs will not work.

Even if no dedicated URLs are supported, most cameras provide at least a snapshot image that can be shown. To show a continuous image stream that refreshes the snapshot image in a specific interval, a user-specific HTML page including JavaScript can be added to our web visualization. More information about this way of integration can be found in our knowledge base: Tutorial: Integrate a webcam view in a visualization project .

Testing the IP camera

The best way to ensure whether a smooth integration in our visualization is to make a real test. First, it has to be decided whether the IP camera shall be embedded as Internet / Multi-Internet control or it shall be shown in a separate web view. Integrating it in a separate web view is in general much easier since some restriction exists for embedded it an existing page.

Restrictions for embedding IP cameras as Internet / Multi-Internet control

Recently, web browsers like Google Chrome do not allow to embedded URLs in iframes that contain username / password for basic HTTP authentication. This is mainly due to security reasons. Thus such IP cameras that have password protected web interfaces cannot be integrated anymore in Internet / Multi-Internet controls. Please keep in mind that this is not a limit in our software - the limitation comes from the web browsers.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20574841/http-basic-authentication-url-with-in-password

To allow the integration of such IP cameras, the password protection must be disabled to show them in Internet / Multi-Internet controls – or even better, define an additional user with no password with limited access rights (e.g. user without configuration permissions).

As an alternative, you can open the camera web interface in a separate windows using a button with “Show URL Window” function. Here, the username and password can be specified in the URL.