What to Port forward and how
I have 7 different buildings. Each of them has their own LAN, Wifi routers etc. In each of the buildings I have Trendnet cameras. I am able to set up an instance of SecuritySpy in a single building on a single LAN. It works very well. I am impressed.
However the idea of setting up 7 separate mac minis each running a SecuritySpy and only having web access in real time is expensive and not as good as setting up a single instance of SecuritySpy in the property office.
ATT is evil. They want $12 per month for an IP address! (31 cameras!) ~$4,500 a year just for IP addresses.
My question is simple what do I need to port forward? Is the RTSP video stream on the same port as the login?
I assume I can simply map port forwarding to port 554 and pick up the RTSP?
What am I missing?
Comments
I am assuming here that these are not buildings on the same site that are connected together by Ethernet, but that each building has its own independent Internet connection. Please correct me if this is wrong, as my answer will be different if you can connect the buildings together by Ethernet.
In order to stream video from all cameras back to a central location where you run SecuritySpy, you will need to set up port forwarding for each camera to make it accessible to the Internet, and you will need to set up one DDNS name per site (which is then used for all cameras at that site). See this other forum post for detail instructions on how to set this up: Advice/help setting up a remote camera.
You don't need static IP addresses, because DDNS takes care of this (and anyway, the IP address is per-site and not per-camera, with each camera at the same site being independently accessible via a unique WAN port).
Note that this will use constant upload Internet bandwidth at each of the sites that the cameras are streaming from, and also constant download Internet bandwidth at the site where the Mac is located (amounting to the sum of all the upload bandwidth at the other sites). So depending on the number of cameras, their resolutions and frame rates, this could amount to a significant amount of data.