surveillance camera viewer programming in .net

Question

I'm trying to build a viewer application for analog surveillance cameras in .NET. Something along the line of Zoneminder. Just wondering if there's any api available or where should I start looking in the .NET framework? I'm no expert in the imaging area. Thank you.

Answer 1

This looks interesting. It's not in C#, but it should be easy enough to port it to C# using one of the online converters.

See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/236249/simple-net-webcam-library

Answer 2

For an analog surveillance camera, you'll need an encoder. You can find cheap encoders that support DirectShow which you can wire together and display in a .NET app quickly.

You need to be careful in choosing a capture card though. Many manufacturers claim to support DirectShow but really only utilize DirectDraw internally and have no real support for DirectShow. Or they support DirectShow but not any of the standard connectors that are used and basically support it in name only. Or they support DirectShow but require custom code just for their card.

Here are a few options I would recommend.

http://www.winnov.com/

http://www.viewcast.com/

If using a USB webcam is an option instead of an analog security camera, it'll be cheaper and easier. The camera will usually support DirectShow directly although sometimes you can run into color space conversion issues with certain cameras and there's no way to know about this ahead of time until you test a particular camera.