Secure Display Stations compatibility with cameras through ONVIF

Introduction

IONODES’ Secure Display Stations are dedicated video wall appliances designed for quick and easy setup of single or multi-screen video walls. Secure Display Stations are fully compatible with most modern IP cameras and IP encoders through the industry standard known as ONVIF. This allows Secure Display Stations to integrate with most major brands of IP cameras and IP encoders on the market without the need for brand-specific decoders or proprietary hardware/software, eliminating the drawbacks of vendor lock-in.

Secure Display Stations have ONVIF’s own discovery protocol integrated which automatically scans the local network for all ONVIF-compliant IP devices, making deployment a quick and simple process. Deployment typically takes a few minutes at most and, using our software tools, you can also easily replicate video wall configurations across multiple devices on your network in a few easy steps.

Certain non-ONVIF compliant IP devices using the RTSP or MJPEG over HTTP protocols, for example, can also be integrated to the Secure Display Stations for displaying video streams but with a limited feature set, such as no PTZ control, for example. Manual configuration is required as ONVIF discovery is not possible with these devices.


Compatibility


ONVIF Discovery

The integrated ONVIF discovery wizard communicates over the local network using the Bonjour protocol and interrogates for any ONVIF-compliant IP camera or encoder. ONVIF-compliant devices return video profiles and configurations found.

ONVIF-compliant devices return information on multiple camera parameters in response to the initial discovery query, the available RTSP streams and their respective stream URIs amongst some of them. Video encoding information is also sent in the response, such as supported video encoding types (ie. H264, H265 etc), available video profiles (ie. H264_1, H264_2, MJPEG) and specific encoding configuration including video resolution, frames per second, throughput. etc. Finally, all the information regarding PTZ compatibility is also sent in a single response from the camera, including supported features, such as pan, tilt, zoom and preset functions, like set, clear, goto and home.

 

IP Camera Compatibility

Based on internal lab qualifications and customer experience, below is a shortlist of major-brand IP camera and IP encoder manufacturers which are compatible with the Secure Display Stations:  

  • Avigilon
  • Axis
  • Bosch
  • Dahua
  • HIKVision
  • Panasonic
  • Pelco
  • Samsung / Hanwha Technwin
  • Sony 
  • Vivotek
  • And many more 

 

Other features

IONODES Secure Display Stations can decode video streams from your local IP cameras and IP encoders up to native 4K resolution. The SDS user interface allows you to control your PTZ-compatible cameras through ONVIF without the need for a separate workstation or controller. Video stream connections only require selection of one of the video profiles exposed by the camera and are entirely passive so they will not interfere with existing or pre-configured media profiles, preventing conflicts with centralized video management software (VMS) for example.


Conclusion

IONODES Secure Display Stations can easily be integrated to your existing IP surveillance infrastructure to display live streams from any IP camera, working in parallel to your VMS solution. With no need for additional hardware, software or proprietary decoders, your return on investment is quick and ensured.