A proven video management system optimized for Axis’ network video products. AXIS Camera Station is developed with a focus on ease of use and intuitive operation, ensuring that anyone can effectively manage incidents and quickly export high definition evidence. Many people wonder how vlc connects to an RTSP network camera (especially the Axis ones)? Well, the answer to this question is to use RTSP. What is this RTSP thing? RTSP is a application level protocol designed for controlling delivery of data with real-time properties. The data is such as audio and video either live or stored (video on demand).
The more feature-rich PC-client is available free of charge at www.axiscompanion.com. AXIS Camera Station. Viewer for AXIS Camera Companion Utilities. App for your AXIS Camera Station 5 surveillance and security system – a feature rich solution for efficient surveillance of small- and mid-sized installations, ideal for 4 to 50 cameras. I'd like to add Axxon Next to the list of Video Recording Software. Axxon Next works with a long list of cameras and is Free for up to 16 cameras and 1TB of storage.
I’ve been asked about what’s a good reasonably priced NVR that supports a wide range of cameras. I thought about it and most that come from surveillance cameras companies work mostly with their brand although some support a few brands, it’s not wide enough to cover all. So I had a chance to install Synology’s latest operating system, DSM 4.2, mostly for my previous review on Hikvision’s ability to write to NFS, but then curiosity got the better of me and purchased 3 Synology Surveillance Station license (first one if free) and put it through it’s paces over the past few weeks.
First you have to understand what Synology is. It’s dubbed as a “smart” NAS as you are able to install apps on the NAS in a similar way people add apps to their smart phones. It displays an icon list of apps and you click on the icon and it installs the app. Surveillance Station is one such app and you get to use it for free for 1 camera. Additional cameras cost $49.99 from Synology but other resellers may offer it for less.
When you first log on to the NAS via a web browser, it displays a screen like this
Clicking on the 4 square icon at the very top left lists the installed apps and clicking on Suveillance Station opens a new window. Important to note that while the NAS devices have weak processors, the CPU utilization with 4 cameras, 2 with camera based motion detection and two generic camera via ONVIF with NAS based detection, CPU use never really got above 10-20%. You can monitor NAS performance from this main screen.
This is the first screen in Surveillance Station. Why they chose to enter on the Management tab is a mystery as most NVR solutions enter on the Live View screen.
You can see there’s basically 3 tabs for Live View, Timeline and Management. So I’ll start with the simplest by clicking on Live View. As you can see, I have a simple layout of 4 cameras, but you can chose from several layouts. Double-clicking on one camera image displays only that one camera, double-click again to return to the standard layout. You can create multiple layouts by selecting it from the drop down with the word “default” on the left. Clicking the the icon to the right of that allows you to edit and create new layouts.
The active image has a yellow boarder, you can use the zoom slider or a mouse wheel to zoom in/out of an image (applies to playback too) and you can use the mouse to drag the image around, pretty intuitive. You can see from the picture below I zoom in to each camera’s image.
Cameras don’t automatically get added to the layouts, you have to add this manually in this screen by dragging available cameras to the square. You can’t add the same camera twice so you have to drag it out of the box to add a new on in it’s place.
To view recordings, you click on the Timeline tab on top. There’s a slider on the right that you move to find recorded video (green bars). This is in Sync mode where it shows all cameras synced together. You can unsync them by clicking the icon that is currently blue in the lower left. This creates a line for each camera that you can work independently of each other
The other icons are the camera for snapshots, the down arrow for downloading video, the eye for a smart search, and the clock for time seek (search by time).
The timeline on the right with the green lines represents recordings made. When zoomed out by default, it represents a 24 hour period but you can move the slider below it to zoom in to get finer detail of recording times.
You can see there’s a calendar where you can chose different dates to search. You can also use play/pause to control playback as well as click on the double arrows next to the play button to control speed like 1x,2x, 4x, 8x as well as slow motion, 1/2x, 1/4x, 1/8x.
Clicking the eye icon for Smart Search puts you in this screen. From here you can select from a wide variety of search types as shown below. Then draw the area to be searched and click search.
It goes from recording to recording looking for events that match your search criteria. It’s slow as it has to analyze each recording but faster than doing it by hand one at a time. When it finds a match, it shows a blue square where motion was detected and puts it on the list on the right as a video found.
After all the videos are found, you can double-click on each one to view it in the playback box.
It works as expected and can help speed up looking for the needle in the haystack.
Circling back to the Management tab, this is how cameras are added. Beyond the first one, you’ll need to purchase additional license keys. To add a camera, in the Management tab, click on IP Camera on the left side of the screen and then click on the Add button. This is the screen you will see.
I filled out the values and clicked the “Test Connection” button to make sure it’s correct. Click on Next takes you to this screen where you set the resolution and video format. Don’t try an set the recording and live view settings as different as it doesn’t work, they have to be the same, but may be a limitation of my camera, not this product.
Clicking “Next” takes you to the recording options
Clicking “Next” takes you where you can set a recording schedule, for example if you only want it to record while you are at work.
Clicking “Next” takes you to the final screen in the Add camera wizard. This allows you to chose if you want the camera to do the motion detection and provide the Live View feed or you want Surveillance Station to do this. If it’s a generic ONVIF camera that’s not on their supported camera list like Dahua, then you have no choice but to let Surveillance Station do the motion detection. Clicking on the “Advanced” button lets you pick the motion detect parameters to complete this.
If you make a mistake or want to change something, you can select the camera and click Edit and make the changes here. Go from tab to tab to make any changes you want.
Conclusion
After using Synology Surveillance Station for a few weeks I’ve come to a few conclusions. Having a NAS at home to do backups of multiple PCs, for having servers process setup that you may need and multi-tasking as an NVR is a cost effective NVR solution vs. dedicating a PC for this or having a dedicated NVR.
There are some quirks you should be aware of, none are critical but can annoy some people;
- 1080P max resolution – I have a 3MP camera in the mix and it cropped it to 1080P
- It can be slow as it’s web based on moving video from the NAS to your PC can create a few second wait between viewing videos
- Has quirks on playback where it sometimes stops after viewing a few events and you have to hit play again
Some of the pluses of Synology Surveillance Station are;
- Web based interface is identical no matter where you are
- Free Android and IOS app to view each camera one at a time and view recordings from list
- Combining multiple functionality of a NAS with Apps on one device may save you money
- Updates are free (no annual maintenance fee)
This is a good choice if you want an NVR that supports a lot of different brands and models of camera, you are OK with 1080P resolution as the maximum and you can take advantage of NAS features or other apps available on the device.
More information and specs are available on their website HERE
UPDATE: This what their free DSCam Android app looks like (they also have an IOS app). These are pictures of my Google Nexus screen taken from my camera.
This is the initial screen showing the 4 cameras. Does not have layouts, just shows a list of cameras –
Tapping on a camera displays that camera in full screen (my camera is 4:3 and my Google Nexus is 16:9 so it preserves the aspect ratio). You can zoom with typical hand gestures.
To view recordings you tap on top bar and selected recordings. It gives you a list of recordings as shown below. Tapping on a line plays the recording.
My only comment is that it works. I’ve seen better. I would expect to see all cameras at once on one screen. I would have expected to at least see thumbnails on the list of recordings and have options to filter by camera and time period. Looks like it was written to be optimized for a small smartphone screen but today’s 5″ Android phones and tablets, I would expect something a little more complete.
Axis Camera Companion (ACC) is free software from Axis that allows Axis cameras to handle the heavy lifting of motion detection, recording and notifications without the need for a dedicated full-time 24/7 PC or NVR to do this. The program installs on just about any Windows PC where you want to view the cameras and recordings. The advantages are huge as you don’t have to rely on a single point of failure for recording, you don’t have to have a PC dedicated as a netork video recorder, saving wear & tear, electricity and costs.
Axis Camera Viewer Windows
There’s a few limitations you should be aware of. First, it’s limited to 16 cameras which should suit most home and small business users. The other is it’s limited to their newer cameras that have Edge Recording. Cameras that have SD card slots can record to the SD card slot, all the cameras supported can write to network attached storage (NAS). Inexpensive NAS devices can be purchased from about $129 on up depending on capacity and failsafe redundancy features. For my testing, I used both,32GB Class 10 SD cards (some cameras use standard SD, some used microSD) and a Western Digital My Book Live 1TB and cost about $129. The choice of SD cards vs. NAS depends on if you need the higher capacity, if you don’t want the storage of the video in the camera if the camera is stolen, on the other hand, not having any plugged in device is appealing to some.
Basically it’s pretty simple. I first went through and tested each camera and set a fixed IP address on the network, set the clock, basically all the stuff found in the Basic Setup for the camera. Don’t go beyond that and set event servers, event types or motion detectors as you will be managing that via ACC. If this is an existing camera with that already set, delete it or it will record the same thing twice.
The first step is to download the software from the Axis website. After you install it, when you run the program for the very first time, you get this “Get Started” screen.
This initial “wizard” will walk you through the basic setup. It starts with a site name and password. It uses different passwords for different security levels. This is where you enter your administrator password.
It will now search of all of your Axis cameras that are supported. You can see below that out of 4 cameras, 1 didn’t qualify because it needed a firmware upgrade. I went to the Axis support site and downloaded and installed the latest firmware. The screen did not change even after I clicked on Search Again. I had to continue and add this camera later.
The next step is that it looks for cameras with SD cards and formats the card. Make sure there aren’t any recordings that you were fond of before getting to this step.
Once you’ve gone through the basic setup, it will show you all the installed cameras. It displays the cameras as thumbnails across the bottom. In this case, I had 4 cameras, they all fit, if you have more, you can use the arrows to scroll. You can control the size of the thumbnails by moving the divider between the large image on top and the thumbnails. You click on a thumbnail to view a larger image from that camera.
Along the bottom, besides the scrolling arrows, there’s an icon to take a snapshot and one that looks like blue bubble wrap. Click on the blue icon to see a full screen of all your cameras. You can right-click to select how you want them arranged, as a grid of 4, 9 or 16 cameras. Hitting the ESC key returns you back to the normal view.
Across the top you’ll see a few icons. The first is the live viewing option as shown above. The next one that looks like an old-fashioned movie reel allows you to view recorded video and the big cog puts you into the configuration menu. The far right is question mark for help which I’ve had to use a few times.
The configuration screen is where you can set all the options for a camera and even add a new camera. The buttons on the left are the various categories. Then you get icons specific to that category across the top. The first one adds a new camera, the next one deletes a selected camera. The double blue arrows refreshes the screen. The most important it the cog with a pencil for changing camera settings. From this screen, the first thing you should do is go through each camera and type in a more descriptive name under the Name column. Make sure Motion Detection is checked and if you want Audio recorded (assuming your camera supports audio).
Clicking on he Cog icon gives you a drop down of choices for Camera Properties, Storage, Motion Recording and Continuous Recording. When you select motion detection, it takes you to this screen where you can set options such as the recording resolution, frame rate and select a schedule of when you want motion detect recording.
Clicking the Setting button takes you a window that allows you to define the motion detect zone shape. Click & dragging a square allows you to move that edge in/out. Clicking and dragging a line creates a new square that you can manipulate. You can decide that this is an exclude zone by checking the box at the bottom. You can make pretty interesting shapes that are not available on the camera directly.
The Site button on the left takes you to where you can save your configuration, export the site to a file so you can replicate it on another computer. You can also set the various passwords to control security level, for example, if you want a user to view cameras and recordings but not change the configuration, you can edit the Operator Access password.
![Axis video viewer Axis video viewer](/uploads/1/2/6/0/126066049/567980284.jpg)
Clicking on the second icon, the movie film reel will take you to a timeline of your recordings. The light blue signifies continuous recording, the red is motion detect recordings. The plus/minus sign on the far right of the timeline allow you to zoom in on a shorter or longer timeline period. You can select a camera and position the line where you want to start and click the play arrow to start playing that recording.
You control playback speed by hovering over the play button and a radio dial appears that you can move either to slow or speed up playback. In my example below, I moved it to the far right and you can see that “8X” shows on all the displays to show you how fast it will play back and it then disappears a few seconds later. Scrubbing the timeline shows you the time as you slide, but no images until you let go of the mouse. It’s not instantaneous as it has to pull the images from the camera SD card or through the camera to the NAS. Compared to NVR devices and software I’ve used, I would say performance is average as I’ve seen better and worse.
This is a close up of the speed control dial.
This is a full screen shot of the speed control dial in action.
Right click on the image lets you go into Investigate Mode. This allows you to move the slider back and forth to rapidly find the portion of a recorded event. It shows the active image in the center and 1, 5, 15 and 30 frames ahead above and after below. https://learningskiey929.weebly.com/gns3-client-for-mac.html.
If you want to save and export a series of events, select the camera and click on the floppy disk icon on the lower right and two yellow arrows will appear. Move these arrows to cover the amount of time you want to export to disk.
It will save the events as individual files. It will also include the Axis File Player so you can play it on any Windows PC. This way if law enforcement is involved, you can hand them the videos with the player together to allow viewing. Torrent client for mac transmission.
This is what Axis File Player looks like. You can view the video full screen, pause, rewind, fast forward and take a snapshot.
Smart Phone Apps
One thing I was excited about was the Android and IOS apps for ACC that Axis promotes from EyeSpyFX. I went to download it but two things turned me off. First the $8 price for a camera viewer that only works with one brand of cameras and the 1 star rating, not sure I’ve ever seen a lower rating, but 1 star from all reviewers, ouch. There does not seem to be ACC integration for configuration and playback and the app is not stable are the top complaints.
The IOS app has the same price but a 3 star rating showing there’s hope. Again, stability and no integration with ACC make me question this app’s effectiveness.
Would love to see Axis make a free viewer app for their cameras that’s easy to use, stable and allows you to not only view the camera, but also has some sort of alerts system and lets you view Edge Storage recordings. The AVTech EagleEyes app would be a great model for Axis to follow.
In the meantime, I would recommend IPCamViewer, both the free lite and pay versions work very well for live viewing.
Conclusion
Axis Camera Viewer Software
This is definitely a winner. Not having to have a central PC or NVR running 24/7 to me is huge. It allows me to deploy cameras without regard to network capacity, PC performance, PC costs and maintenance, single point of failure NVR or PC outages.
A question I get asked is how does this compare to Mobotix and it’s MxControlCenter software. Mobotix does have a slight edge if everything you want to do is directly from the camera’s web interface, but ACC is a lot easier to configure and use than MxContolCenter by a wide margin. For a home or small business, hands down I would pick ACC over MxControlCenter. In a larger commercial environment with more than 16 cameras, Mobotix has the edge.
The pluses for this software are;
- Price – Free
- No investment required in hardware
- Very easy to use, short learning curve
- Low power consumption as there’s no need for a PC or NVR to run 24/7
The wish list for this software is;
Axis Camera Station Client Viewer For Mac
- Axis Smartphone Apps – preferably free
- Mac OS X Support
Link to ACC on Axis website is HERE