Tag Archives: video

A Field Study Using CaptureSync

In a now-famous experiment initiated by the Washington Post, world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell performed undercover in a busy metro station. Using a priceless Stradivarius violin, Bell performed music that he normally plays in front of large concert audiences around the world. The result? Hardly anyone paid much attention to the violinist, or tossed many coins into the open violin case by his feet. The experiment provides a fascinating insight into the importance of context in our experiences of the events around us.

The performance was recorded, but only by a single low-quality camera. What if we wanted to record the experiment properly, from multiple angles, in order to analyse every aspect of the event and people’s reactions? This is the kind of task that CaptureSync is perfect for, and the setup of this hypothetical recording is detailed below.

Layout

Firstly we will consider the layout of the space, and where the best camera angles will be:

Subway Layout

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Adding Live Video To Any Web Page

This tutorial will show you how to add live video from SecuritySpy to your own web page. This does involve editing the HTML of your web page, but it’s relatively simple. Our favourite tool for this is TextMate.

Firstly, you must set up SecuritySpy for remote monitoring, so that it can be accessed over the internet. Next, create a special user account in SecuritySpy that has permission only to view the camera that you want to use. Finally, determine the camera number for the camera in question – this is shown in the Camera Info window (highlighted in red below). If you don’t see this column, click the header bar where you see the column names, and a menu will pop up that allows you to add it.

ci_no1

Three methods for embedding the video feed into a web page are outlined below. In the examples shown, the address of the SecuritySpy system is “demo.viewcam.me”, the port is 8000, and the camera number is 1.

Authentication is supplied via an auth parameter, which is the the Base64 representation of the string user:pass (i.e. the username and password, separated by a colon). Use an online Base64 encoder to generate this value: simply enter your user:pass string, click the Encode button, and copy and paste the result.

If you want to specify a particular size for the image, add width and height parameters, for example the URL in Method 1 would become something like this:

http://demo.viewcam.me:8000/++video?cameraNum=1&width=640&height=480

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SecuritySpy and ONVIF

SecuritySpy is our flagship video surveillance software product for Mac OS X, and as of version 3.2, SecuritySpy supports the ONVIF protocol. Here are the answers to some common questions, and information about this new feature.

What is ONVIF?

ONVIF is an open industry standard for IP-based video surveillance products. In the past, SecuritySpy would have to be pre-programmed with profiles for each camera it supports, containing information about the supported streaming formats, audio capabilities, communication ports, resolutions, frame rates, Pan/Tilt/Zoom features etc. This is inconvenient and time-consuming for us as developers, and also bad for customers because there is an inevitable delay between a new camera coming on the market and an update to SecuritySpy to officially support it.

With ONVIF, all this information can be obtained from the camera automatically. Therefore, any new ONVIF-compliant camera hitting the market can be immediately used with SecuritySpy using the ONVIF setting built into the software.

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Comparison of Streaming Formats

The latest version of SecuritySpy supports new streaming formats which significantly enhance compatibility with new and existing network cameras. The following information about these formats will be useful when making purchasing decisions and setting up video surveillance systems based upon SecuritySpy.

Network Streaming Protocols
There are two main protocols used for carrying video and audio data over IP networks: HTTP and RTSP. Using these protocols, it is possible to transmit video and audio in various compression formats (JPEG, MPEG-4, H.264, AAC etc.).

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