Does anyone know how an Android phone can manage to display live camera footage when it doesn't have activeX, which is necessary to view it on a Laptop in IE? Firefox wont display it. The phone version EZeye does not allow disk search and store, but can store live video footage. Alternatively how do I manage to control the CCTV from Linux? Zoneminder doesn't like my Ubuntu 10.4 installations.
ActiveX isn't the only technology out there - or even the most widely supported, by a looooooong chalk.
You need to do some digging and see what the URL to the cameras streaming output is.
Both my cheap no-name IP cameras had an inbuilt web server which gave you an option use the ActiveX version, or the plain browser version. Picking apart the web page for the plain version gave me the URL, and the various commands to move and control the camera. I then created a camera module for zoneminder.
But it seems to be the one defaulted to my most of the consumer market IP cam makers.
To address the original question, most camera have either an HTTP(S) or RTSP video feed URL. The android apps will be using that. ActiveX is used for configuring the camera and for some of the fancy viewing modes.
It's still an abomination - ActiveX was a crap technology and it needed to die, preferably before it was born and at the latest, about 10 years ago.
I had a play with tinycam pro a few weeks ago and it lists loads of cameras to choose from. It was supposed to be a free download from amazon but its now asking me to pay so its been binned as i don't need it as I have a linux based nvr.
Have you tried RTSP with VLC on the laptop? You might need to research for the correct URL for your camera type, or sometimes an ONVIF manager can reveal the correct URL directly. If that works you can probably find an RTSP app for android, can't see why you'd want to record onto a phone though ...
What's the camera? There might be other streams available from it (that don't require ActiveX).
Capitol scribbled
ActiveX is/has being dropped by M$.
The URL for the 4 camera system is DDNS and works perfectly. The phone works perfectly all over the world for a live stream, but can't control the system when you wish to see what happened in the past. Linux/Android cannot display the live stream in the browser when using any browser, to the best of my knowledge.
A decent IP camera ought to support ONVIF. There are a number of ONVIF apps on the play store, I have Onvifer for looking at my Hik Vision camera. Onvifer also does RTSP and MJPEG.
Supported until 2020 AIUI. Another good reason for keeping W7/XP? Firefox needs an extension to cope with ActiveX applications, Seems like a number of commercial websites used it and don't want to recode.
Large corporations used it for intranetty stuff, and they wouldn't move to a platform which won't support it.
Ah OK, I understand now that you were originally asking, how *does* it work on android, rather than *can* it work on android ... still the answer is because there'll either be a raw mpeg4 (or similar) stream or an RTSP source encapsulating a stream, it's just a case of finding the URL for it ... once found you can probably view it on a PC without IE/ActiveX. If there's an NVR/DVR between the cameras and the world, you need info on what make it is ...
IE11 is still available (alongside Edge) on Win10, so if you *want* to run ActiveX, you can ...
For viewing try VLC
Instructions with my Andriod IP camera
VLC Media Player is a cross-platform video player, streaming server and converter solution in a single package.
For using IP Webcam with VLC media player, in its menu select Media ? Open Network Stream and enter http://192.168.0.12:8080/video for streaming video or http://192.168.0.12:8080/audio.wav for streaming audio.
***** 192.168.0.12 ***** is the current IP address of my cameraYou can also use VLC Media player for video recording:
Select Media -> Convert/Save. Select Network tab Enter http://192.168.0.12:8080/video as URL Click convert/save Select destination file, format in which you want to save and you're good to go
The associated software with my IP camera (old android phone with and app) gives alternative possible viewers.
Andriod Tinycam monitor
Andriod/iOS IP cam viewer for Andriod and iOS
Cross Platform VLC (as above) Zoneminder (which you say doesn't work)
But it seems to be the one defaulted to my most of the consumer market IP cam makers.
/To address the original question, most camera have either an HTTP(S) or RTSP video feed URL. The android apps will be using that. ActiveX is used for configuring the camera and for some of the fancy viewing modes.
It's still an abomination - ActiveX was a crap technology and it needed to die, preferably before it was born and at the latest, about 10 years ago. /Q
Yup.
+1 (again)Jim K
ActiveX is supported on 8,8.1 and 10.
If you have a Windows machine.
I use iPOLis on Android to monitor Samsung cameras. I'm not sure if it can handle other manufacturers.
This site:
has a good list of RTSP URLs for many cameras.
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