Accessing IP cameras in OpenCV
First of all you have to understand a bit about my background. I have never worked with IP cameras before, but I will have to access multiple IP cameras simultaneously with OpenCV very soon. Apart from that, my network knowledge is not that much good.
Now the question. I know OpenCV can access IP cameras using its URL with the help of VideoCapture. There are number of questions in StackOverflow as well. But, the IP address is something that can be changed by time to time, it is dynamic. So even in a IP cam, the IP will change by time to time. So if this is the case, does this mean every time you try to access the cameras with OpenCV, you have to find the IP address of the camera manually and change the URL in OpenCV as well? I do not need to access the cameras via the internet, accessing locally is fine, via Wifi or network cables. How can I set a fixed IP address/ URL so the OpenCV code has nothing to change every time?
PS: I navigated through lot of websites (sites from more than 5 result pages of Google search) but the answers given are either too old or not that much convincing. So I decided to walk into OpenCV forum for the answer.
Hmm you could create a piece of software that has to be fired up with the IP address as an argument. Then if you change stuff, then do restart the functionality with the correct argument. On the other hand, if you are using a multiple IP camera setup, I would think the first thing to do is to get static IP addresses for your camera's, not dynamic ones.
@StevenPuttemans: But there are lot of android apps out there which facilitate you to watch the system online via the phone. This clearly means IP Cams has a static IP right?
They could use MAC address filtering (don't ask me how to implement it ;) ) The idea is that each camera has a unique MAC identifier (since it is networkable) and this could be a way to connect to a specific camera. They could also be sloppy and make the default behaviour of the camera be: When you connect to the network, broadcast some identifier that the software on the computer/smartphone will recognize as being a camera. Then, the IP address of that camera will be known... While I haven't used an IP camera with OpenCV, I have come across a couple networked devices in my life where security was at best an aftertought...