Netcat

Netcat IP Cameras

Netcat is one of many Chinese IP camera vendors. http://www.netcatcctv.com/English/index.html

Like many other Chinese cameras, if your camera looks similar but goes by a different name, then try the programming steps below. It may work.

Helpful Tools

The ONVIF Device Manager is a free, Windows only based tool which is very helpful in developing ZoneMinder support for cameras which support the Onvif standard. https://sourceforge.net/projects/onvifdm/

Netcat Outdoor PTZ Camera with 20x Optical Zoom

Netcat sells several varieties of PTZ cameras. These instructions are based around model PT-PTZ2084. See the photo on the right.

Be advised, this camera ships with a hard coded ip address of 192.168.1.10. DHCP is turned off. One cannot change this from the camera's web portal. Instead, install the included CMS software onto a Windows machine. Find the Device Manager, and add the device to the CMS sofware. When adding the device, you will have the opportunity to change the ip address of the camera. Be advised, you cannot change the password at this point, even though it may look like you can (you will just get an error). Once the camera has been added to the CMS sofware and appears in the hardware tree on the left, double click it to get the camera to load. Then right click it, and select "Device Config". This will bring up the camera's configuration screens. To avoid lag and other unnecessary problems, it is highly advised to lower the frame to 5 fps.

Create the Monitor

From the Zoneminder console, click "Add New Monitor" and enter the following:

General

Name: {give the camera a name}

Source Type: ffmpeg

Function: {select an appropriate function from the dropdown}

Enabled: Tick

Maximum FPS: Empty

Alarm Maximum FPS: Empty

Source

Source Path: rtsp://{ip address}:554/user=admin&password={admin password}&channel=1&stream=0.sdp?

Remote Method: RTP/RTSP

Options: Empty

Target colorspace: 32 bit color

Capture Width: 1920

Capture Height: 1090

Control

Controllable: Tick

Control Type: Netcat ONVIF

Control Device: Empty

Control Address: {ip address}:8899

Auto Stop Timeout: 1.00

NOTE: As of this writing, the Netcat ONVIF control script has just recently made it into the source code. If you do not have this control script already installed, you will need to import the information from here: https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder/blob/master/scripts/ZoneMinder/lib/ZoneMinder/Control/Netcat.pm

First copy the control script, Netcat.pm, onto your filesystem into the folder with the rest of your control scripts. Next, save the sql statement shown in the commit to a file, call it netcat.sql, and then use zmcamtool to import it into your system: sudo zmcamtool.pl --import netcat.sql .