Sony IP camera & Wavelet compression

BennyBladh · Post by **BennyBladh** » Tue Apr 11, 2006 2:29 pm

Hi All,

i have a bunch of Sony SNC-VL10p IP cameras. This also seems to be more or less the same hardware as to the "Webeye E10" camera from webgateinc.com. (Actually the WebEye firmware may be loaded into the Sony camera, but only after bypassing the MAC-address filter in the upgrade utility, which can be done with a HEX editor *giggle*). It is supposedly some embedded Linux running in there.

However, the camera has the annoying feature of not being able to produce good old JPEG still images. It only seems to support what they claim to be a Wavelet Compression format.

I have found out that i can request a video-stream from the camera by using the following URL: http://x.x.x.x/cgi-bin/ns-push?IMG_RESO ... n&PW=admin
The MIME type the camera reports is "application/x-webeye".

Have anyone any suggestions on how to convert this into something usable that would work in ZoneMinder? Maybe it would be possible to make some kind of proxy, something like 'wget -O - <camera-url> | wavelet2mjpeg' and then making that work as a CGI and run on local webserver and have ZoneMinder request video from that CGI-proxy thingy instead? If i only had that wavelet conversion utility...

As i've understood, ZoneMinder has support for MJPEG, right?

I could gladly provide anyone with a sample of the wavelet stream, but i don't seem to be able to upload files here in the forum?

//Benny

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Tue Apr 11, 2006 2:54 pm

Yes zm currently only supports mjpeg and you cant upload to the forum but you can link to your own content or send it to me and ill host it for you.

Regarding the wavelet thingy, maybe there is conversion server app like ffmpeg, i know it can covert on the fly to various formats, maybe it can take your stream and make a mpjpeg one? Other than that i dont know im afraid. Do you need some sort of plug in to view this cam?

BennyBladh · Post by **BennyBladh** » Wed Apr 12, 2006 10:01 am

You may find a sample at: http://rat.dacom.se/dl/sony_vl10p_videostream.dump

Funny thing is that when i tried to download the file in Firefox, it actually believes it's an image-file and says "BMP-file, 720x486 pixels" in the window title bar. And the number of pixels reported by Firefox is also correct, the camera has that resolution, so it interpreted some things correctly.

I have tried ffmpeg, which claims to be able to read some kind of wavelet compression algorithm, but unfortunately it says it does not recognise the format of my file:

[bb@carter ffmpeg]$ ffmpeg/ffmpeg -i sony_vl10p_videostream.dump -o out.mpg
FFmpeg version CVS, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
configuration:
libavutil version: 49.0.0
libavcodec version: 51.9.0
libavformat version: 50.4.0
built on Apr 11 2006 14:13:41, gcc: 3.4.4 20050721 (Red Hat 3.4.4-2)
sony_vl10p_videostream.dump: Unknown format
[bb@carter ffmpeg]$

When using the web-interface in the camera, it loads either an ActiveX component or a Java applet for viewing the video stream. But Sony actually claims it is some kind of standard and not altogether propriatery.

//Benny

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Wed Apr 12, 2006 10:21 am

I will have a look at tthis and see if i can see anything obvious but the link doesnt work at the moment. Is it correct or just unplugged?

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Wed Apr 12, 2006 3:38 pm

are you sure thats a bmp, as its not a bitmap format i know of? Is this cam available online can i try and pull some stuff of it?

BennyBladh · Post by **BennyBladh** » Wed Apr 12, 2006 6:23 pm

I'm not sure of anything... it's probably not a BMP as in Windows Bitmap-file, since it's supposed to be compressed with Wavelet... I just noted that Firefox thinks it's a bitmap of size 720x486 pixels, which is actually true...

And sorry, no, that cam is not available on the internet. Maybe I can arrange that for you if you think it may help?

//Benny

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Wed Apr 12, 2006 6:52 pm

well im game if you are, but there are others here better at this sort of thing than me. I will look to see what i can find out about this cam.

jameswilson · Post by **jameswilson** » Wed Apr 12, 2006 9:19 pm

I have found a demo of a snc-z20n and can make this work with zm, is your cam similar as it seems dicontinued and i cant find much out about it?

BennyBladh · Post by **BennyBladh** » Thu Apr 13, 2006 8:47 am

The SNC-Z20n is a newer model, and according to Sony:s webpage it's actually supporting some normal standards such as JPEG, so i'm not surprised that it works better with ZM. Unfortunately it's a totally different camera than mine. I suspect my camera is not produced by Sony, but some little company in Korea and only OEMed by Sony. Sony took it out of production mid year 2005, but it is still sold by "WebgateInc" as the "Webeye E10". But since i have 25 cameras and don't want to throw them away, i would really want to have it working with ZoneMinder...

I have mailed you privately IP and login to a live camera that i have set up in my lab room. If someone else also want to play with it, i can mail it to you privately as well. Every help is very much appreciated!

//Benny

alexus · Post by **alexus** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 5:48 pm

how about to use this codec: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~poe/dwithome.html