Posts

Stefan Helander

Vivotek PT7137 rtsp stream to webpage using VLC plugin

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One way of getting the video from Vivotek PT7137 to a webpage is by using the VLC plugin and connect the rtsp stream.

However, in current version of Chrome the VLC plugin is no longer supported. Instead it is suggested to use HTML5 to embed video, but rtsp is not supported in Chrome so it is kind of a dead end there for the moment. This solution works in for example Firefox.

In the webpage where you would like to add the stream:

<object classid=”clsid:9BE31822-FDAD-461B-AD51-BE1D1C159921″ codebase=”http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/last/win32/axvlc.cab” id=”vlc”>
</object>
<embed type=”application/x-vlc-plugin” pluginspage=”http://www.videolan.org” autoplay=”yes” loop=”no” width=”600″ height=”340″ target=”rtsp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@IPADDRESS:554/live.sdp” />

Replace USERNAME, PASSWORD and IPADRESS with real values for your Vivotek PT7137 camera. It might be a good idea to create an account in the Vivotek PT7137 to use from the web as the username and password will be visible for anyone who inspects the webpage source code. That said, putting the root user account and password here would be considered stupid 🙂

Tip for Joomla users: If you include this code in a Joomla site, include {emailcloak=off} before the above, because the @-sign will trig Joomla email cloaking beliving it is an email address.

Stefan Helander

Vivotek PT7137 network camera connection problems

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Vivotek PT7137I use the Vivotek PT7137 network camera connected through wifi/wlan to my network. Even though it is located only 7 meters from my accesspoint (with a couple of walls in between) the camera lost connection once in a while. And it wouldn’t reconnect unless I rebooted the camera. Upgrading to the latest firmware (v2.6 2009-04-14) didn’t improve either.

At the time my accesspoint was a DLINK DI-624+ broadband router and before I had time to dig into the problem any further, the DLINK passed away permanently and I got myself a Linksys WRT54GL which I pimped with Tomato. Now I had much better control over the wireless environment. I could boost the output on my Linksys to 80 mW (from the original 42) and the wireless survey helped me select a good channel with as little interference with my neighbours as possible. This helped a bit – the loss of connection occured more seldom. But they did still occur.

External WLAN antennaFinally I bought a small external antenna for the Vivotek in my local computer store. It has a 5 dB gain and a magnetic mount so I could move it around without moving the camera. This finally solved my problems and my camera haven’t lost it’s connection in months.

I still haven’t found the reason to the loss of connection. 7 meters should be no problem in a wifi/wlan environment. All other gadgets I connect through the same wireless network works without any problems. Possibly my Vivoteks wireless is broken or something in Vivoteks implementation makes it really sensetive to interference? I don’t know and honestly, I will not spend more time on it unless it causes me a problem again.

Stefan Helander

Calibrate Vivotek PT7137 from URL

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The Vivotek PT7137 is a pan-tilt network camera from Vivotek.

After panning and tilting for some time, especially after hitting the boundaries a couple of times, the camera is in need of calibration. You can see this if you have some predefined postition and selecting it doesn’t bring the camera centered to the selected position.

Calibrating the camera can easily be performed by logging in as the administrative account (root) and selecting the Maintenance in the menu. The Calibrate button will immediately calibrate the camera.

However, in some cases you would like to calibrate the camera directly by entering a URL or by using a script.

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