Remote control of a motorized camera
Optionally a motorized camera such as the Sony EVI-D70 may be remotely controlled via SOAP. In this way a user may control the camera properties such as pan, tilt and zoom just by pressing buttons on a web page while monitoring the streamed video on the same page. Please have a look at a simulation of such a page. Please note that in this example no live video of a camera is streamed. The reaction of the camera is simulated by a selection of stored still images.

The photos are screenshots of a real streaming video (encoded with the RV 9 codec), so the quality is similar to the real implementation.

Technical implementation
A MotorCamServer application is installed on the Linux based StreamBoxx systems or any other Linux system. The remote control port of the camera is connected to the com port of this system. It receives the commands from the client via any IP connection (via the SOAP protocol), it processes the XML pakets and controls the motorized camera via the RS 232 or RS422 port. Today the Sony cameras EVI-D31 and EVI-D70 are supported. Support for other models is planned.

The XML pakets to control the camera may be created from different programming technologies. In this example, the client application is PHP based. Optionally other technologies such as JavaScript, VBscript, ASP, JSP, Visual Basic, C or Perl could be utilized. A basic requirement is, that the platform is capable to generate XML pakets and can exchange them with the camera server via the SOAP protocol.

Example
The server based PHP scripts process the press of a button by reloading the controls frame. It generates an XML paket and sends it to the camera server. The camera server processes this paket, sends the command to the camera, waits for command completion and returns a result XML paket to the client application.

Demonstration (a simulation)

Pricing and availablility
The software includes the MotorCamServer application (for Linux) and the html and php pages (for the webserver). Pricing starts at EUR 199 (net plus VAT).