Two major types of IP cameras? One viewer app?

[avgjoeuser]

I have purchased a handful of IP cameras from ebay all claiming to be ONVIF compliant. I was hoping to find a single lightweight viewer for all of them. That's where my learning curve started.

It appears that these ebay cameras come in two primary flavors. Those that work with CMS and require IE for web access and those that don't work with CMS and can be accessed with other browsers. This is a gross oversimplification! But it describes my primary problem. I cant find a lightweight app that works with both types.

By themselves the cameras are similar, they support motion based emails and ftp uploads for snapshots (only), support 720p video, and stream over RTSP. There is some great information on the 6510 based "CMS" cameras on this site. I cannot find the same detail on the other non-CMS cameras.

The only app that "works" with them both is the "ONVIF Device Manager" (ODM). However that is only suitable for testing. I have tried iSPY and some other "heavy" apps that may work but require more horsepower than I am willing or want to dedicate to this. I can install CMS on any of my PC's and it works well even on the lower power ones. The same holds true for the viewer app that comes with the non-CMS cameras. But I don't want to have to run two apps!

What I really want is a CMS like app that works with both camera types. Has anyone else found a CMS version or other LIGHTWEIGHT app that will work with both of these cameras?

 

[alastairstevenson]

I haven't tried this but on the face of it, it may be worth testing.
VLC is fairly optimised, though it's also very capable so you might be using more resources than necessary.
http://alex.mamchenkov.net/2014/11/27/vlc-mosaic-multiple-rstp-streams/

 

[avgjoeuser]

I haven't tried this but on the face of it, it may be worth testing.
VLC is fairly optimised, though it's also very capable so you might be using more resources than necessary.
http://alex.mamchenkov.net/2014/11/27/vlc-mosaic-multiple-rstp-streams/

Interesting suggestion! Not as easy as an off the shelf app but I am actively testing this. First lesson....no cvlc for windows. That rules out using it with most of my PC's. So it will only be good as a secondary option.

I was hoping I could use VLC on windows for viewing live feeds then write a small app to listen for ONVIF motion events and initiate a period of recorded video to a video server. The second part is still possible but I don't want to build a viewer from scratch. VLC does work with both camera types as a single window viewer.

Hopefully I can work this out.....