Has anyone had a successful setup of a docker application that would allow you to run a PTZ Onvif Camera.
Open to other ideas too
I want to mount a PTZ Camera to the roof of a fire truck and have it remote controlled from an operations center.
No, but I have controlled some cameras (and see video) with intouch
Not entirely sure what the point of any kind of on site container would be here just to control the camera - perhaps you could elaborate on your reasons for looking at that?
As Bryn mentioned IcControl + InTouch might meet your needs, otherwise this to me would be a prime use case for PepVPN back to your ops centre to provide remote access via a secure VPN to the camera.
If recording of footage from the camera was important in case of poor connectivity I’d probably not be looking at a Docker image here and instead be looking more to whether the camera could support local storage to record footage.
This is a good answer.
I wish there was more training on how to use these things. I have zero knowledge of Peplink stuff.
I will look into InTouch.
I am mounting a PTZ camera on the roof of a firetruck. I am plugging it into power from DC source, and the ethernet into the Peplink.
I need to be able to see it and control it from an operations center.
InTouch is basically a reverse proxy.
The Peplink at the truck essentially makes a connection to a Peplink hosted server, you connect to that server and can then access the camera.
How well InTouch works with CCTV cameras has for me been quite hit and miss, more often than not miss.
InTouch also uses data from your SpeedFusion Connect allowance, so if you’re streaming video that may get used up quite quickly.
The other option I mentioned would be having the Peplink router at the truck build a VPN back to a central location where you have another Peplink router to terminate the VPN tunnel onto, that could potentially mean you’d need another Peplink for your ops centre (and suitable connectivity with a public IP) but it may also offer a few more advantages over InTouch:
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Easily connect to other networked devices in the truck.
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Depending on the Peplink you have in the truck you could leverage SpeedFusion bonding to provide more reliable connectivity to the camera.
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Potentially addresses compliance issues - you control the VPN hub and router directly, aside from the public internet the camera footage is not going out to some 3rd party cloud (not sure what your local regs are for that, but for us something like InTouch would likely not be permitted here).
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Easier expansion - got more trucks and cameras? Add more Peplinks and build VPNs to them.
I’d probably suggest having a look for a good local Peplink partner to work with at this point, they can guide you on what the equipment you have is capable of and go over the options - Peplink kit can be a bit of a swiss army knife at times and there are often multiple ways to use them.
I have done this before using a clever local hardware encoder. It records the Video in HD locally, then streams the video to a hosted server (your datacenter) at the best bitrate for the available bandwidth at the lowest possible latency / delay.
Then you can remotely change the resolution and framerate depending on what you need to see and when you need to see it.
Advantage is you can send a 8kbps stream of video most of the time (so hardly any bandwidth used), then up it to full resolution and frame rate on demand when you want to get a closer look of the live video, and then pull any historic video as HD recordings from the encoder on demand when you want to look at historic events in more detail.
The remote viewing client lets you control the PTZ camera remotely too.
Here is a video showing 4 IP camera streams running at <20kbps…
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@MartinLangmaid
What is this device , you speak of “clever local hardware encoder.” ?
Pretty sure Martin was using VideoSoft for that project.
They have special codecs that can run down to kilobits per second for video - I have also worked with them on some projects for remote CCTV over LTE with good results though in that instance all the clever codecs and their magic was built into the camera directly along with the LTE modems and we used their bridge device to bring the cameras back into the customers regular VMS.
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this was a raspberry pi 4 with videosoft encoder running. very clever.