video killed

Wednesday, March 18. 2009

video killed

...the radio star. Yeah. Anyway, I have a linksys WVC54GCA Network/IP camera that I've been playing around with. This camera is convenient because it's wireless so I can put it almost anywhere I want... or I could if the fucking piece of shit didn't lose it's wireless connection every ~24 hours and require a reset to get back online. So I have to run cat5 to the fucker instead. And it doesn't support PoE. Annoying, but it seems to work OK with power and UTP stuck up it's ass. Whatever. Remind me not to buy linksys again.

I've also been playing around with ZoneMinder and trying to get it grabbing video from the camera. That worked fine at 320x240 (jpeg) but not at 640x480 (jpeg or mjpeg). I finally figured out that it was a memory allocation problem. Even though I had followed a tip I found somewhere on upping the limit to 134217728, apparently that wasn't enough to grab high res from the camera. Finally I found this tip and I raised the limit to 268424446. Now it works fine at 640x480.

The most difficult part of the process was finding the URL's for grabbing video/stills directly. Through googling and experimentation this is what I came up with:

Linksys WVC54GCA - firmware 1.00r24

320x240 jpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/snapshot.cgi

640x480 jpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/snapshot.cgi?a
(I first tried ?res=640x480, which worked, but then I discovered that passing any argument at all gives you the larger jpeg)

640x480 mjpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/mjpeg.jpg
http://camera_ip_address/img/mjpeg.cgi
http://camera_ip_address/img/video.mjpeg
(I don't know whether there is any difference between these. I didn't notice any.)

640x680 mpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/video.asf
(VLC 0.9.4 plays this perfectly, including audio)

Trackbacks

    No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

  1. Andy Sutton says:

    Thanks for the URLs! That post saved me a boad load of time. To return the favor - set the IP address of the camera statically. I was having the same issue until I did that. It seems that the camera is too stupid to renew the expiring DHCP lease.

  2. ra says:

    Actually I used a static IP from the start as the camera is on a separate subnet without DHCP. Even so it would only work wirelessly for a day or two before dropping off the network. I got sick of resetting it and ran a wire and it's worked fine since. I just won't buy Linksys/low-end Cisco crap anymore.

  3. Patrick says:

    Funny part, if you leave it at the original firmware R22. the /img/snapshot.cgi returns the resolution your camera is showing, when you update to R24, you indeed need to give a bogus parameter. (Bug?!?)

    Just like your cam connects to an NTP server for the time, if you set adjust for daylight savings on, it indeed takes the correct time, if you reboot your camera, the time is fetched without requesting for daylight saving changes.


Add Comment


Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA 1CAPTCHA 2CAPTCHA 3CAPTCHA 4CAPTCHA 5