[Talk] Linksys WVC54G Internet Camera

[Nick Simicich]

About 10 days ago, I wrote about a camera done by Hawking, which I
thought was nothing less than pathetic in terms of security, function,
and reliability.

I returned those cameras to CompUSA and picked up a Linksys WVC54G.

I am a lot happier with this camera. Then again, it costs more. It also
supports sound.

In this case, the same camera supports wireless and wired mode.

First off, they also have a program that you download from the camera to
view it. This program is an active-X control, signed.  It, of course,
will only run under Windows and only under IE, that is the nature of
active-X.

The security on the camera is better. There is an "extra port", but so
far as I can tell, you don't need it for the active-X control functions
- nor do you need it to view the stream remotely. I ran an ethereal
trace of the active-X control's communication (I'm all switches now, so
I had to run the windows version of ethereal - I guess I could have
mucked with my routing).  It accesses the camera viw http at
http://address.ip.or.domain/img/video.asf

Now, the stream produced at this address is a relatively ordinary mpeg4
stream - with sound.  It can be viewed with Windows Media Player, or
with, say, Realplayer, or with mplayer under Linux.  This command does
the viewing under Linux, with the best chance I have found of keeping
up:

mplayer -user xxxxxxxx -passwd yyyyyyyy -vc mpeg4ds -framedrop
-hardframedrop -autosync 1 -ao sdl -vo gl -ni -cache 128
http://dhcp010.squawk.com/img/video.asf

Under Windows, you present the above url to one of the many players,
like media player, say, and - bang - you are viewing the video -
provided you have downloaded the codecs (and provided you are behind my
firewall) - if not, well, realplayer led me through the codec download
for the audio and then I was able to get sound. If you have required a
userid or password, then the userid and password must be presented
correctly to view the stream.  This is an http: stream, not an https
stream.  So you know you are NOT getting encryption.  But you should
know that. 

If you open up the web port, and you give someone a userid and password,
they can view the video as well.

It uses a Sharp encoding for the audio. The Codec is loadable using the
usual codec scheme (my installation of Mplayer already had the codecs I
needed.)

Now, it does seem to get behind on the video with many of the codecs -
in fact, I have been unable to keep it synced - with the above command,
it *mostly* keeps up - but then, sooner or later, the sound separates
from the video, and once that happens, it is hard to tell exactly what
is happening.

This does not seem to happen on the Windows boxes. 

So, what I need is a program that will look at an mpeg4 stream and which
will convert it to jpegs - I would be happy with something that would
give me a jpeg at the beginning and then stop.  Anyone know something
that will do that?

I installed mjpegtools, but that did not seem to be able to do what I
want.  Or, well, I can't figure out how to do it.

Good points:

Security is based on standard web password stuff. They don't require you
to pass cookies, which means that you don't need cookie files. All the
players support this sort of security.

No encryption, but none promised.  Hawking's doc mentioned encryption in
a way that promised that it would be used on remote connections - but it
was only between browser and camera, and not between camera and web site
- although that was never laid out.

Standard userid and password can be changed.

Password can be longer than 4 characters.  No special characters,
though.

There can be play only userids - that is, you can give someone a userid
and password that allows them to view the picture without changing the
camera's parameters.

In no case was I able to crash the box and get a bunch of data out of it
as I could with the Hawking.

It is Linux based.  GPL code is available.  There are links that the
camera says point to the camera's windows based control program, but
they do not.

The same box will run both wired  10/100 ethernet and Wireless 802.11g. 
Oddly enough, the box comes configured to use a fixed address, not
DHCP.  There is a small LCD on the front of the camera. It told me that
it was at some odd private address, and that it was a fixed address
(there is a little "fixed" spot, to tell you the mode). I set up a
secondary virtual adapter so that I could talk to it, reconfigured it
for DHCP, and it then redid the address, and told me what that was on
the little led.

This little window is actually incredibly convenient, when you don't
want to use the package that runs on Windows.  All configuration works
fine from Linux/Mozilla/Firefox.  

(The default mode for the camera is "ad-hoc network" which I thought was
amazingly odd. Then again, that goes with no dhcp.)

The program in the camera will e-mail someone when it detects motion
(actually, up to four addresses) and it will send them a short clip.
This is also configurable. I have not tested it in wireless mode yet,
nor have I tested the e-mail mode. It uses the same WEP password
generation scheme as the usual Linksys stuff, which probably means that
it will work with my router properly - with just the passphrase copied,
and not the long hex number.

So far as I can see, there is no way to tell the camera to "send a
snapshot" - or to tell it to do a time lapse - a snap every 30 seconds.


BYW, I ended up accidentally running mplayer once without an X display
to work against and I was sort of surprised to see that it turned the
video into a character mode moving picture as you would see on, say, a
music video, or like the old days when people printed pictures on 1403
line printers.  You can recognize movement, but not really anything else
- you can tell that someone has moved across your screen, and maybe even
that they are approximately human shaped, but you can't really say who
they were.  In any case, it was sort of cool that it worked at all.

If anyone knows of linux (hopefully free) tools that allow me to snip
stills out of an mpeg4, or something that mplayer can convert to, I'd
really appreciate them. I'm sure that there are some, as my guess is
that the camera uses them to produce the mailed stills.
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