can you think of any way to get a q-see surveillance system display on an iphone?

[astromoose]

Hello All,

I am trying set up a Q-See QSD9004 four camera+DVR video surveillance system for someone. (they picked it up at costco) The DVR/camera system is a small linux based unit and hooks into ethernet to serve up a web based display interface.
The problem is that it requires active X, so I cannot view it on any OS X machine or the iphone. I can only see it on a winXP or vista box running IE.
The box for the camera system says it is 3G mobile phone compatible, so the person that got it assumed it would work with their 3G iphone (turns out it is only windows mobile and symbian compatible).

How can I get this thing to display on an iphone?
The two ideas I had are (1) to set up an old windows laptop running the web interface on IE and logmein, but if this even worked I think it would be painfully slow.
The other option (2) being to get a USB video capture device to hook up the camera systems composite video output... hook that to one of the macs (this is an internet cafe full of macs BTW) and stream it to the internet with evocam webcam streaming software(which the iphone can access I believe).

Can anyone think of another way to do this?
Any other ideas, solutions, insights, criticisms are very welcome
Thanks!

 

[gorcorps]

There are some remote PC apps, but they're pretty slow. If you need to see full motion video they won't help you any.

 

[ViRGE]

If it's Windows Mobile and Symbian compatible, I'm curious how they're pulling that off. Neither runs ActiveX, so the stream must be served up in an additional, more normal manner.

 

[hanoverphist]

ive got a couple customers that use gotomypc.com to remote in, theres an app for winmo, i bet theres one for iphone as well. its pretty quick, even with streaming video. of course, their system is fed by a solid 12mb pipe. hell, even their guest wireless onsite is at 7mb, pretty cool.

 

[astromoose]

ViRGE: Yes I was thinking along those lines as well but I have no idea how I would access whatever other way it is sending the streams out.

The company does make a proprietary windows app so you don't have to use IE in windows, but there is no way i can figure to get the video from it besides: ... right now I am running it and 'webcammax' (which is able to make the application window a 'webcam' input) , then using webcamxp to stream that out to the internet, which the iphone can pick up via javascript interface.

This ends up needed a dedicated computer since webcammax is capturing a portion of the screen and turning it into a 'webcam'.

There must be a better way

 

[ethan976]

If you are using the 9004 surveillance system by Q-See, there is an app for the iphone called SuperCam. Do a search on the app store, and you will see it. The search criteria is case sensitive (kinda retarded), otherwise, you won't find it if you don't use capital S and C.

Additionally, the app is only good when using WiFi. If you try using it on 3G, it won't work. This is a limitation of the carrier being that surveillance systems are RTSP, carriers typically don't allow RTSP because it takes up a lot of bandwidth. This is a similar situation to SKYPE. I'm not sure if that's going to change anytime soon, but I'm looking into it.

I hope it helps.

PS. That's what I'm using for my 9004, and it's pretty kick ass!

 

[Muadib]

Originally posted by: ethan976
If you are using the 9004 surveillance system by Q-See, there is an app for the iphone called SuperCam. Do a search on the app store, and you will see it. The search criteria is case sensitive (kinda retarded), otherwise, you won't find it if you don't use capital S and C.

Additionally, the app is only good when using WiFi. If you try using it on 3G, it won't work. This is a limitation of the carrier being that surveillance systems are RTSP, carriers typically don't allow RTSP because it takes up a lot of bandwidth. This is a similar situation to SKYPE. I'm not sure if that's going to change anytime soon, but I'm looking into it.

I hope it helps.

PS. That's what I'm using for my 9004, and it's pretty kick ass!

I emailed Q-see about iPhone support, and they still haven't gotten back to me. Thanks!
If you jailbrake, there's an app that should make SuperCam work over 3G.