Merry Christmas to you all. Here is a small gift to all those with IP cameras following the ONVIF specification. There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras. After working with upstream for a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that the libonvif package entered Debian Sid last night.
The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the cameras and a GUI tool to configure and control the units as well as preview the video from the camera. Libonvif is available on Both Linux and Windows and the GUI tool uses the Qt library. The main competitors are non-free software, while libonvif is GNU GPL licensed. I am very glad Debian users in the future can control their cameras using a free software system provided by Debian. But the ONVIF world is full of slightly broken firmware, where the cameras pretend to follow the ONVIF specification but fail to set some configuration values or refuse to provide video to more than one recipient at the time, and the onvif project is quite young and might take a while before it completely work with your camera. Upstream seem eager to improve the library, so handling any broken camera might be just a bug report away.
The package just cleared NEW, and need a new source only upload before it can enter testing. This will happen in the next few days.
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.