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