How to control ptz camera?

[weisee.c]

i am creating a program to control the ptz camera, but it doesn't work. I have no idea how to do this. Can someone help with it?

Thank you.

[rolfk]

PTZ usually stands for pan-tilt-zoom rather than a brand so it is totally unclear what camera you have and the connection it uses. Is it USB or network? Does it integrate in Windows with a driver so you can access it in Skype, VLC or whatever just like any other webcam or does it come with it’s own proprietary application to use?

[weisee.c]

The camera that i used is D-Link ptz camera and it is an ip camera. It does have its own application to use. However, now i want to control the camera's motion through Labview. Is there any suggestion or example to do it?

Thank you.

[rolfk]

IP cameras are a pitta to use from other software. There is not a single standard for that and each camera manufacturer tends to use its own combination of IP endpoints, image compression and streaming protocol.

There are two approaches that often can work. One is to use a web browser container in a .Net LabVIEW container that is pointed to either the JPEG still image stream most of these cameras do provide with or without auto update feature. The other is to dig into RTSP streaming and implement everything yourself. The RTSP container format is fairly simple as it is build around the same principle than HTTP and there are already user contributed libraries for that, the tricky part is to get the compressed image data out of the stream as there are various formats and many of them are patent encumbered.

Because of this last point it is often easier to use an external component such as the VLC libraries and let them deal with patent issues (or not which could get you in legal trouble if you ever plan to use that software in a commercial way). There are also several LabVIEW wrappers around for the VLC libraries.