blog/data/2022-12-24-onvif-camera-debian.txt

   1 Title: ONVIF IP camera management tool finally in Debian
   2 Tags: english, debian, multimedia, standard, surveillance
   3 Date: 2022-12-24 08:00
   4
   5 <p>Merry Christmas to you all.  Here is a small gift to all those with
   6 IP cameras following the <a href="https://www.onvif.org/">ONVIF
   7 specification</a>.  There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool
   8 in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras.  After working with upstream for
   9 a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that
  10 the <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/libonvif">libonvif package</a>
  11 entered Debian Sid last night.</p>
  12
  13 <p>The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a
  14 command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the
  15 cameras and a GUI tool to configure and control the units as well as
  16 preview the video from the camera.  Libonvif is available on Both
  17 Linux and Windows and the GUI tool uses the Qt library.  The main
  18 competitors are non-free software, while libonvif is GNU GPL licensed.
  19 I am very glad Debian users in the future can control their cameras
  20 using a free software system provided by Debian.  But the ONVIF world
  21 is full of slightly broken firmware, where the cameras pretend to
  22 follow the ONVIF specification but fail to set some configuration
  23 values or refuse to provide video to more than one recipient at the
  24 time, and the onvif project is quite young and might take a while
  25 before it completely work with your camera.  Upstream seem eager to
  26 improve the library, so handling any broken camera might be just <a
  27 href="https://github.com/sr99622/libonvif/">a bug report away</a>.</p>
  28
  29 <p>The package just cleared NEW, and need a new source only upload
  30 before it can enter testing.  This will happen in the next few
  31 days.</p>
  32
  33 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  34 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  35 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>