Camera Vision 2.0

Looking at todays tendency of video surveillance systems it can be easily noticed that popularity of IP based solutions is growing really fast. There are quite a lot of manufacturers, who provides great range of IP video cameras and video servers, which are intent to serve in a professional IP-enabled video surveillance system.

More of it, many companies provides solutions aimed to convert current CCTV video surveillance systems to IP based systems, keeping current equipment and infrastructure. In addition to these companies, who provides not only hardware solutions, but software as well, there are a lot of companies, who focuses on software part of IP video surveillance systems mostly, providing complete solutions as for small or enterprise business, as for personal use.

In the article I would like to share some of my experience in working with different IP video cameras and video servers from different manufacturers. The provided information is related mostly to accessing these cameras from your own application, which may be a simple application for your personal needs or which may be something more sophisticated and even close to some sort of video surveillance application.

As a demo application to the article I am providing a C# application, which allows as single camera viewing as multiple cameras viewing simultaneously. The program allows simultaneous view of not only several cameras from a single video server, but allows to view many different cameras even of different manufacturers at a time.