mort wrote: Tuesday 22 October 2019 14:18
as I said earlier, I understand little about this, so I want to clarify: what will give me the opportunity to receive screenshots that the camera sends to FTP?
I have such a setup, with all cams sending to a dedicated subdirectory on a FTP server installed on the PI that also hosts Domoticz. This FTP use a tmpfs in RAM not to wear the uSD card, just the time for captures to be post-processed by a service I wrote that kicks-in every 10s to:
If files are present, post-process them to get rid of (almost) black images (I have some external lights that kicks in on moves at night and, at switch-off, trigger some black captures before switching back to night mode), cypher-compress and email them to a dedicated gmail account, erase local captures (or store them on SD if send failed, not so often).
Problem is if you don't understand so much about it, as installing configuring the FTP server and building your own setup needs some understanding (not really a click to setup thing!), it's IMO out of reach.
At least if you have snapshot URL you'll be able to trigger some easily from Domoticz, but without internal camera capture setup sending as much at is can you'll IMO miss 90% of the information that may be of interest.
As well, using different camera brands may turn to an headache: FTP clients in the cam almost never work exactly in the same way (create dated subdirs, add other informations on top of captures, may use FTP commands incompatible with some servers). So a working solution for me may not work without updates for you! As well, you have a problem of independent writers/readers here FTP servers are not made to manage: You'll sometimes read partially written files that can't be used. I used vsftpd for years without so much trouble with low resolution (thus small capture files with less probability to have issues) cams but now, you'll get HD cams only on the market and there was at least a bad image in every 10s capture frame. Had to change for proftpd that have a nice "hiddenstore" feature even if, basically, reason for change was integration of new Dahua IP cams that were using an outdated allocate command (to check in advance FTP server side can handle the file to be uploaded) unsupported by vsftpd.
So my advice, if you can't do this yourself, is to use some ready made DVR that'll process video streams for you and manage motion capture in the same way for each camera. Problem is this'll use a large bandwith on your LAN continuously, but every camera working it's own way does not allow commercial solutions to make best use of their internal features.
FTP change to handle a new brand is always a pain: Finding what cause problems (using some tcpdump to figure out what is on the wire because cam side is almost a black box, cross-checking with server side logs), testing other servers for one that works for new cam as well as old ones, thus learning their configuration scheme... On file-system side, you need as well to bypass the PI storage flaw with some configuration again...
Even with some background and understanding, this is time consuming. Happily, I don't setup a lot of new devices now my system is built.
=> Buy cheap cams, checking supported video streams standard & keep the money for a compatible DVR.