What easy ways exist to share an ip cam for public access

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I want to put a couple of IP Cameras at the house of my nan so that the rest of our family can keep an eye on her in this tricky time of life.

I know this can be done with streaming services and also it can be done pretty easy with a Network DVR, but these cost a ton of money that I do not have at the moment, in fact I am now without any income at all.

What I do have is a bunch of Dahua IP cameras sitting doing nothing.

A NDVR would be the easy solution but this means that the rest of my family need to specific software installed to view the cameras, complicated for some of my family who struggle even to use a mobile phone, especially my mum who has managed to avoid using one up to her 64 years of age.

One luck and to my absolute amazement is that my nan was given an internet package for the elderly that is just fantastic:

A Very good internet access, I think is fiber based.

IP Based TV

A Linux Mint PC with printer

A router that has 3 spare ports ( in are the TV and PC ).

The router has a static IP address ( And I can ping it from the WAN )

She's 87 years old and has better kit than me :)

I contacted the supplier and installer of the equipment who have kindly given me access to the router to configure local port forwarding. I can log in fine and see the PC and TV connected.

So technically as I see, it has all that is required from a hardware point of view.

My thinking is / Port should show just a very basic featureless view of that camera on that port.

I want to try to do this without passwords and without us needing third party viewing software on our devices, so that all the family can keep an eye on her.

So the question is
Does it exist a free application for Linux Mint that can share/stream a couple of cameras connected to that router. I am not looking for high quality high speed video, just enough to see she is fine.

Good health to you all and thank you for reading my post.
 

bp2008

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Hi.

Some years ago, I wrote a program that can run on linux and proxy jpeg snapshots from ip cams. It is a .NET program so to run on Linux it requires the "mono" framework. bp2008/cameraproxy It is not the greatest thing and would require quite a bit of linux skill to get it running reliably in the background. You can probably find much better programs to do this these days. But this could get the job done without you needing to forward ports to the IP cams directly, and without needing to pay for anything.

Remember, turn off the UPnP feature in the router otherwise the cameras might forward ports to themselves and get hacked that way. You should not forward ports directly to IP cameras unless you have set up a whitelist of source addresses that can connect through the forwarded port (not all routers support such advanced firewall rules).
 

Cameraguy

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I was just thinking about this.. I might make a new server in blue iris, a group of cameras and access over ui3
 

bp2008

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^ Blue Iris would definitely be the way to go if you could put a Windows machine at the location. It would do the job very well and is quite well supported here. But it also isn't free.
 

Cameraguy

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^ Blue Iris would definitely be the way to go if you could put a Windows machine at the location. It would do the job very well and is quite well supported here. But it also isn't free.
$60 split between family members is well worth piece of mind
 

concord

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An open source option would be motioneye and it has a mobile/phone app too. Note that I played with it on my Raspberry Pi for the fun of it a few years ago, but never used the mobile app.

I assume you are using the standard Mint install (not LMDE), here are instructions for Ubuntu, which the standard Mint is based on:

 
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