Access cameras remotely (free)

Companies are starting to charge to access cameras remotely, this is mainly because individuals do not know what steps to take to do this for free. More specifically, they are charging a lot using inadequate cameras...

There are pics below of each router and camera page. I am not a computer guy, but I know this works reliably with the equipment I mentioned in a previous post. Perhaps one of the network experts around here may be able to suggest further enhancements. In fact, there are other ways to do this without modifying the router info as the cameras also have dyndns built in.

Here are the steps:

Step1 Get a free dyndns account http://www.dyndns.com/services/wizard/

Step2 Add info to your router. To get into a Linksys router type http://192.168.1.1 into your browser.

Step3 Add port forwarding on router

Step4 Change camera to fixed IP address. The way it usually gets an IP address is from your router using DHCP, which can change (say if you lost power). Selecting fixed IP address instead of DHCP causes it to always be at the same IP address.

Step5 Change port # on your camera.

Step6 Access your camera at

http://yourname.dyndns-at-home.com:10057/

or whichever port you have sent it to. I've read that numbers above 10000 are OK for this. What I do to remember is if the camera is at a local IP address of 192.168.1.57 I use a port number of 10057

Axis cameras have a wide range of settings, and can record directly to a SD card based on motion or other criteria. You can access the camera "live view" and you can also access any recordings on the SD card.

The example I provided in a previous post of a camera web page can be modified to use the address above. In this way you can access all cameras at once while you are away. This is pretty cool, if of limited utility. Yes, the house is still standing...

On the other hand if you've programmed lights to go on and off at certain times using automation (at the last second before a trip) and you're wondering if it worked this can help.

You can also use this method to access cameras via your cell phone (there are special streams for this) and your analog DVR if it has this built in (most do these days).

The reason this all works is that network IP cameras are really just cameras (like your point and shoot) with a server built in to them. Some people have even taken this a step further and used the camera to host a basic webpage. One could take a web page for home automation and host it on the camera server. I've pondered doing this but believe it or not I just use a pretty basic cell phone...

Mike

 

We have a camera in our store that we can access from home. Word of warning: my husband left the monitoring up on his computer 24/7 and we received a phone call from Comcast that we had exceeding our monthly 250 GB bandwidth allotment by 170 GB. Our normal use is less than 100 GB. We were told if we exceeded it again they would drop our service and not reinstate it for a year. No exceptions.

It took us a little while but we figured out the culprit was the camera monitoring. Now we only access it when we actually want to watch it!

 

Interesting.

Let's say you were at 40Mbs, or 5MBs, you would have 1GB in 200s or let's round down and say 3 minutes. Based on 250GB cap you could view for 750 minutes or a little over 12 hours. I wonder if most DVR's would stream at that high of a rate, but I can see how if you accessed it all the time you could exceed the cap.

For people who are new to this note that this will not be affected by port forwarding per se, only when you access the stream from outside the local network i.e. viewing things connected locally to your router are not affected by this.

If this truly became an issue with IP cameras you can sometime set up independent streams and limit the rate. For example I just tried limiting one to 1fps. I just tried this on a small 352x240 stream which is around 3Mbs, setting it to 1fps instead of 15 dropped it to 0.35Mbs.

So one could get it down to something manageable like 4 cameras at 2Mbs, or 0.25MBs and you're still stuck with 240 hours...bummer. Playing with compression settings you could get another factor of 2, and if you accessed a smaller stream you could get a month of continuous viewing and stay under the cap.

So it looks like it could be done, but as you say if you just access it when you need it you are fine and likely no one needs to access it continuously 24-7.

 

I also doubt your home security system would be uploading/downloading that much data. I'd investigate the security of your WiFi.

If you're running WEP, please consider moving up to WPA/WPA2. It only takes a few moments to break a WEP access point and then start torrenting data. Don't underestimate your neighbor's kids =]

 

I also layer encryption with Mac address filtering, not 100 percent effective but another thing to overcome for the script kiddies.

 

Not sure if it's my post you're talking about, but we know for sure it was our camera monitoring. My first thought was someone was hijacking our WiFi but we ran a bandwidth monitor and went around the house turning off every device connected to it to find the culprit. As soon as my husband turned off his computer, the usage went waaaaay down. He then had his "aha" moment and when he started his laptop back up, we watched the usage spike again as soon as he accessed the remote monitoring. We have since stopped leaving the monitoring on 24/7 and are back down to our normal usage rate.

Oh, and we're using WPA2-PSK [AES].