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Comment by geijoenr | Hacker News Reader

The market for security cameras is very old fashioned and plagued with proprietary implementations. ONVIF is the standard that allows interoperability with desktop Video Management Systems and other devices, is the protocol that allows to glue together end to end systems.

Some alternatives are starting to appear, but this is an industry that moves really slow. Things only seem to happen when a new player disrupts the market and starts taking market share, as AXIS did with cheap IP cameras back in the day.

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I don't know how complete it is, but this site [1] claims to verify which cameras are truly ONVIF compliant as apparently some companies make false claims about their cameras or gatekeep some ONVIF functions.

[1] - https://www.onvif.org/conformant-products/

The ONVIF SOAP APIs aren't really that important IMHO. They're mostly used for configuration. Configuring your camera is something you do rarely, and if you have to put up with some crappy web interface, proprietary plugin, or Windows-only desktop software for it, oh well.

The most important part is getting the video. The popular open standard is RTSP. Many cameras have astonishingly poor RTSP implementations. See https://github.com/scottlamb/moonfire-nvr/wiki/Cameras:-Reol... for some of what I'm talking about. That ONVIF page (https://www.onvif.org/conformant-products/) says everything is fine for several Reolink models, but I don't believe it!

After that would be some way to get the analytics, assuming the camera has them and they're any good. If the ONVIF API works well, great, but a proprietary API isn't that bad IMHO as long as it's simple.

proprietary API isn't that bad

My opinion differs a little bit. If I buy a PTZ I know some here think those are a waste I expect to be able to control it from an open source application. If I can control all aspects of PTZ audio and video then that is good enough for me, but may not be good enough for others.

I don't think proprietary APIs are mutually exclusive with open source clients. These APIs tend to be a lot simpler than ONVIF (SOAP is a mess) so they're easy to implement and even reverse-engineer (though there's often some documentation on the web). It's just a bit of work for each manufacturer.

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