LabVIEW
Want to Add External Ethernet Camera
@k88 wrote:
Hello,
I have Arecont Vision camera, the recording can be seen by connecting ethernet cable with laptop and I want to get live images from that camera in LabView. At present, I can only see one camera option i.e. my Laptop camera. How can I add the other camera? or do I have to add driver for my laptop?
And what do you use to "the recording can be seen by connecting ethernet cable with laptop"? An application that came with your camera? An image in a browser window when you enter the IP address of the camera?
IMAQdx can’t access this camera directly. It’s a so called IP camera, where IP stands for Internet Protocol and that’s the problem. It’s the lowest protocol layer of every internet protocol stack out there so says nothing about how it can be accessed. One option which your camera seems to support is over a small web server inside the camera where it simply provides a new jpg image ever so many 100ms. Other options are standardized streaming protocols but there are many different standards and used compressor algorithms. And then there are to ones who use a proprietary protocol.
Your only chance is to find a working Windows DirectShow IP camera driver. There are many out there, with the ones being for free usually being hard to install, difficult to make work and often impossible. And not all commercial ones are better really.
Ethernet is the cable, so that is quite correct. But you could have many different network protocols that go through Ethernet such as Novell, or Microsoft NetBEUI, EtherCAT or Profibus. Outside of special purpose industrial network protocols, there is nowadays only the IP protocol suite still of any interest and there mostly protocols based on TCP or UDP.
But just because a camera uses Ethernet and a protocol on top of TCP or UDP doesn't make it universal. Almost each camera talks its own language over that network cable and that requires whoever is wanting to receive images from it must be able to talk that language too. IMAQdx supports network cameras who talk the Genicam standard. Any others it does not understand in itself and you need to have a OS driver that translates the camera specific language into a Microsoft Windows compatible DirectShow interface, then IMAQdx can access it too (usually). Usually because not all Windows camera drivers are of good quality and some implement the bare minimum that you need to use the device in Skype and anything else is just left out as costing to much effort to implement. IMAQdx has a little more requirements than that and that can result in IMAQdx simply failing when trying to access such a Windows camera driver.
I have no experience with Axis cameras but while I can't find that they specifically support the GeniCam specification, they do seem to support ONVIF. Possibly that is enough for IMAQdx too.
