Sorry if that have been already answered, but I did not find though an answer yet. I'd like to monitor different remote cheap USB web cams, attached to a different simple PC's. What is the way to have that cameras to be monitored over the network by the central ZM server? Will hugely appreciate if someone could point me where to look at, if that is covered by some docs. Or short description of the idea will be totaly fine!
I've ZM working with 16BTTV cams, and that works OK. But I can't wire coax cable to a different city
It's not that tricky. What you need to do for each location and each camera:
Run software that provides http (web) access to a single jpg from the camera, updated automatically. There are dozens such programs for all platforms, often including the webserver too. DCAM is a good windows one.
On the router/firewall - map port 80 to that machine. (If you have more than one camera, you need a router that will map other ports to port 80 on different machines OR map different ports and run a different port on each camera server). If it's a directly connected machine, simply open those points on the firewall.
If your locations don't have a static IP, you'll need a dynamic dns setup so you know where to look for them.
On the main server and your zm machine, run a new setup looking for the address of the jpg being served at each location. Eg, -
myhouse.dyndns.com
Port 81
Path /path/to/image.jpg
In most setups fps will always be low and you'll need to play with image sizing to suit, but that's the basic premis. It works fine.
