IP Video Multicasting - Axis Camera

[nwulf]

I'm not sure if this is the right board or not to post this.

A little background first. We've got 4 Axis cameras at a remote site, 2 are P1344E, 1 that is a 211W, and 1 that's a 223M. This remote site is connected via a wireless point-to-point connection. For the most part, there will only be 1 client connected viewing the video feeds 24/7. In addition, if there is motion detected, a recording is initialized in the Axis software to record...so potentially there is 8 feeds. With the live view settings to a point to were we can't modify anymore because of quality (65 compression, 10fps, 800/600 with either mpeg4 or h.264), we have some serious latency issues with many connections. On occasion, there may be another user connect to view the view the feeds....more bandwidth since it connects the client right to the camera.

I'm wondering if I can create (or there is something already out there) software to where the cameras perform some sort of multicast to a "server" and each client connects to the server for the feed. Will VLC accommodate something like this? I would much rather have 1 feed from camera to server and then branch out there.

I'm new to multicasting, and within the cameras there is a section on multicasting..under Network - TCPIP - RTP. The multicast video address is not our regular network address which the default entered is 239.205.176.237.

Anyone have some guidance on where I should go from here? What would my options be to try and minimize client connections straight to the camera?

Apparently Axis's client software only looks to the server to determine certain settings/access rights and then creates a connection straight to the camera.

Thanks.

Nick

[Maloupi]

I am not sure i understand but here is what you can do :
On your server create a vlc instance to get the stream from your cameras and restream it through http for example. The client connects to the server not to the camera. So the bandwidth from the camera to the server will always be the same.

[nwulf]

Sorry, I probably should not have thrown out quality settings and the cameras...really not the site, or topic anyways.

My point was basically how to setup my 4 cameras that are wired at a remote site, but the connection to the remote site is wireless. Right now 1 user viewing 4 cameras = 4 unicast connections - 2 users and 4 cameras = 8 connections...of course the bandwidth is chewed up and has quite high latency.

I'm the software guy and our network guy is looking into making some changes. He change the settings on the cisco AP's to use multicast and the latency has gotten better. I believe he is going to check our cisco switches and enable multicasting, which I think will then enable us to use multicasting.

I did dl the vlcview and put in the multicast path to an IP camera in the network streaming option of VLC software. It prompts me for the username/password of the camera but then I get a blank screen...so I think out switches need to be configured.

Nick