I love WiFi surveillance cameras. Even the cheap ones offer amazing relatively easy-to-use technology that can be very useful. I have two business locations with a total of around twenty five cameras looking inside and outside the business structures and putting their images out on the internet to let me and my management team monitor activity 24 hours a day. My goal is not to spy on my staff. It’s just comforting to be able to do a “walk-around” of the premises anytime I like. Good hiring practices mean I don’t need to watch my employees. I have two cameras at home, but none inside. I have a doorbell cam that has a major flaw that I will discuss later on. I have a pan/tilt/zoom cam on the south end of my house where there are no windows looking out at the street.
Like a lot of my projects, my camera operation is home-brew, incorporating many brands of cameras with varying degrees of capability and quality. I started out in the early part of this century (that sounds weird) with a Samsung Digital Video Recorder (DVR) from Sam’s Club with eight channels, but only four surveillance cameras. I bought it cheap as an open-box special and I installed the cameras to watch the islands at my gas station and the parking lot on a blind side of my building. The box it came in said you could buy additional Samsung cameras to use the remaining eight ports, but my guess was that they would cost more than the original purchase. I found off-brand cameras online and adapted the power and video connections to make them compatible with the DVR so I soon had eight cameras, a couple of which I installed inside my repair shop and convenience store. The DVR stores an amazing amount of historical video and has been churning away doing its job for over fifteen years, but when you compare the image quality to newer HD cameras I have purchased, you can see that it’s time for an upgrade. The cameras have infra-red capability for mediocre night vision, but they have no sound capability.
The first issue you will encounter is the fact that the cameras operate on your local network such as your home or business network and are visible within that network. But you will probably want to see the cameras from a remote location, probably from your cell phone or from your home desktop to look at your work cameras. Most cameras offer a proprietary solution such as a website that let’s you view your video doorbell. Many of these are free with the purchase of the camera and offer paid services such as cloud storage of video events history. So you install the Ring app for your Ring doorbell. But as your collection and variety of cameras grows, you find yourself with multiple camera apps, possibly reporting notifications such as motion. My goal has always been to have a single app that provides, at minimum, viewing capability for all of my oddball collection of cameras. The app we use is IP Cam Viewer Pro. There is a free version, but it limits you to four cameras if I remember correctly. Now let’s get your cameras talking to the outside world.
The first step in that direction is port forwarding your surveillance camera…
When you set up a camera or DVR on your local network it will end up with an IP address and a port that identifies it within your local network. That IP address and port are not visible outside of your local network. If you go into the SETTINGS function of the app provided with the camera, it may or may not show the TCP/IP and port info. These cameras are generally set up to use Dynamic Host Control Protocol or DHCP . This means that the main router on the network “leases” an IP address to your device for an indeterminate period of time. If the camera software does not tell you what IP address is assigned, you may be able to find a “camera discovery” app that will do so. Another method is to use the admin functions of your router to view connected devices, but more often than not, the devices listed do not have a name that clearly IDs them as the device you are looking for, in which case it is useful to get the MAC address off of the camera and search for that among connected devices. The MAC address is like a “license plate” for a pieces of network equipment. It is usually on a printed label somewhere on the camera or DVR. (Helpful hint – take a photo of the label info on the camera before you mount it on that second-story eave)
So let’s say you have found the IP address and port used by the camera. The next step is to use the router’s port forwarding function to “open a door” for your camera to the outside world. Port forwarding is usually found in the advanced section of the router admin functions. In its simplest form, you create a new port forwarding rule that says any traffic coming from and going to the outside world through this port is allowed to pass.
You’re on the Internet!
Once you’ve done that successfully, you should be able to look at your surveillance camera from out in the world, So you enjoy that for a couple of days or weeks and then one day you can’t connect. In all likelihood what has happened is the router, for a host of reasons, has assigned your camera a new IP address through DHCP. It WILL happen, so you need to get into the settings of that camera and create a fixed IP address. Again look at the “connected devices” function of your router, find an IP address that is NOT listed and adjust the settings of the cameras to use that address. If you can’t find a way to give the camera a fixed address, see if your router does MAC address forwarding. The MAC address never changes.
I will address other problems, pitfalls and possibilities in a later post.
Final thought for this post: Surveillance cameras can bring you a lot of peace of mind, but in general, these devices don’t have great security. Particularly for WiFi cameras, CHANGE THE DEFAULT PASSWORD!