Get RTSP parameters for an ONVIF camera?

Spiv
Spiv
edited July 2021 in SecuritySpy
Don't know if this is feasible, or makes sense but thought I'd ask..

I have an ONVIF camera that is nicely auto-detected by SecuritySpy so it is listed as protocol "ONVIF" and the address is a long UUID string.

My understanding, which could be wrong, is that ONVIF, amongst other things, is a wrapper to RSTP streaming. So is it possible to have SS display or show the manual RTSP settings for this camera?

Not strictly for SS use, I have some one-off IP viewer apps that don't understand ONVIF but do accept RTSP and I don't have any documentation on this particular camera's RTSP settings. I was hoping to go "behind the back" and extract the parameters from SS in some way?

Comments

  • Ben
    Ben
    You are correct in that ONVIF (among many other things) is a negotiation mechanism to determine the underlying RTSP streaming parameters, and it is possible to extract this information from SecuritySpy, like this:

    - Make sure you are using the latest version of SecuritySpy (5.3.4 or later).

    - Click the SecuritySpy menu > Debug submenu > Create Debug File On Desktop, then open the debug file.

    - This shows a lot of information about the system and each camera. Towards the bottom of each section of information about each camera, you will see an item called "NV request string" - this is the RTSP request that SecuritySpy is actually using.

    - The full URL can then be constructed in the form rtsp://address/request

    - Note that the "uuid" addresses are SecuritySpy-specific and won't work in other apps. For this you should use the IP address of the camera, which would then need to be a manually-assigned static IP address on your local network, so that it does not change over time.

    Hope this helps!
  • Spiv
    Spiv
    Thanks!

    I noticed an inconsistency.

    Both cameras are configured as ONVIF profile and enabled.

    When I generate the debug file, I see the following in the ONVIF Camera sections (I have two of these cameras right now):

    For the first camera
    In the [DEVICE] section,
    Request (Manual profile only):

    In the [ACTIONS] section
    NV request string: 0



    For the second camera
    In the [DEVICE] section,
    Request (Manual profile only): live/0/h264.sdp

    In the [ACTIONS] section
    (no NV request string at all)


    This did help me figure out the actual string (tested in VLC) is:
    rtsp://aa.bb.cc.dd/0
  • Ben
    Ben
    The "NV request string" item is only present if the camera is actually open at the time, so I presume this was not the case at the time you generated the debug file? Anyway, I'm glad to hear that this allowed you to figure out the request.

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