Re: How to view output of Axis 207 Network Camera?
On Fri, 2025-11-21 at 13:45 -0600, Nate Bargmann wrote:
> * On 2025 20 Nov 09:17 -0600, Anders Andersson wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 20, 2025 at 3:50 PM Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > I have just acquired a (free) Axiz 207 camera. It appears to
> > > work OK
> > > as its web server runs and I can access all the settings etc.
> > >
> > > However I have a fundamental problem, I can't view the images
> > > it's
> > > sending. I think this may be because it uses RTSP to send
> > > images.
> > >
> > > I tried one RTSP viewer (Gardinal's) but that failed miserably.
> > >
> > > I'm not really very clear how it's all supposed to work, I can't
> > > get
> > > any plain RTSP:// URLs from the camera, the only URL I have seen
> > > so
> > > far is:-
> > > rtsptextrtsp://dummyurl/mpeg4/media.amp
> > >
> > > Can anyone help, with a program that will understand what the
> > > camera
> > > is outputting?
> >
> > Just a comment that may be helpful: Debian silently disabled RTSP
> > support in VLC, but kept the documentation that claims it works.
> > That
> > cost me a lot of time when I recently tried to get a camera to
> > work.
> > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=982299
>
> Same here. Quite a bit of frustration only to learn this fact. I
> uninstalled the Debian version and installed the Flatpak version of
> VLC
> and it works well. Until a few days ago, having a couple of RSTP
> camears was the only reason I used VLC at all. Now I've been playing
> with an HD Homerun TV tuner and learned it can stream over HTTP and
> VLC
> plays it just fine.
>
> Incidentally, I've an older Grandstream camera that will only play
> video
> from its Web page using a plugin that only works with MS Internet
> Explorer, as I recall. VLC plays its RSTP stream just fine.
>
> Does Debian have an uncrippled version of VLC in its non-free
> repository (I'm too lazy to look right now)?
>
> - Nate
I use ffplay (it is, IIRC, part of the ffmpeg suite) with a command
line like this:
ffplay -window_title "<camera name>" -hide_banner
rtsp://<user>:<pwd>@<ipa>:554/h264Preview_01_sub
The guesswork come with the last bit; "h264Preview_01_sub" in this
example. There are websites which list these, and some DVR programs can
sniff them out for you.
Chris.
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