Having looked into this myself prior was mostly asking for disappointment. Getting a random Chinese IP camera to convert to open firmware is great in theory, but the problem is actually buying a camera or 10, or buying more over time.<p>You never really know what hardware ships internally at any given time, ie what SoC a camera <i>really</i> is. They change frequently in random Chinese manufacturers with internal SoC hardware update with constant improvement (in their margins at least), if reported by someone at a point in time, buying the same model a 6mo-1yr later you cannot expect the same model number to be the same hardware.<p>It is rarely stated on a site selling them what SoC they use, or the vendors sites, assuming you can find and/or translate anything usable, or if the vendor is even still around more than a few months under that name. Therefore there is no repeatable source of products you can get reliably across time without simply testing a sample and hacking your own as you go.<p>I really wish someone would take initiative to sell/resell a line of camera hardware with openipc or other open firmware on them. It's a business opportunity sorely missing with nothing to offer home/business users ip cameras with open sterile and guaranteed secure firmware vs. random pure Chinese jank.
Seems like e.g. (most of) the sensor drivers are binary blobs.<p>Some examples:<p>Ambarella S3L: <a href="https://github.com/OpenIPC/firmware/tree/master/general/package/ambarella-osdrv-s3l/files/kmod">https://github.com/OpenIPC/firmware/tree/master/general/pack...</a><p>Some HiSilicon chipset: <a href="https://github.com/OpenIPC/firmware/tree/master/general/package/hisilicon-osdrv-hi3516cv300/files/sensor">https://github.com/OpenIPC/firmware/tree/master/general/pack...</a><p>Edit: A smaller subset of sensors have some code here:<p><a href="https://github.com/OpenIPC/sensors">https://github.com/OpenIPC/sensors</a>
<a href="https://openipc.org/support-open-source" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://openipc.org/support-open-source</a><p>>It's Open Source<p>>Price of the Firmware<p>>The right to use the OpenIPC firmware and its components is granted to all users free of charge and only for personal, non-commercial purposes. If you are interested in using OpenIPC for your business projects, please contact our team.
For those curious if their devices are supported. The list is here:<p><a href="https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/guide-supported-devices.md">https://github.com/OpenIPC/wiki/blob/master/en/guide-support...</a>
Totally random question there but... Any recommendations of cameras that are currently easily available(say amazon, aliexpress, etc) and support this while having good/verygood image quality?
A long time ago, I built a business around off-the-shelf IP cameras. The field was full of buggy firmware with enormous security holes (biggest I found was to be able to acquire pictures without even being authorised!). Hardly none of these firmware would get updated, they were abondonware right out of the package.<p>Even though this doesn't seem to be entirely open, any kind of move into that direction is a bit of fresh air.
OpenIPC really didn't mean what I thought it did.<p>I was 100% sure it would be some kind of inter-process communication abstraction / framework.
Majestic, the main streaming "core" component of the camera (which does RTSP, HLS, etc...) is closed source, the rest is open, except some third party SDK blobs.
The interesting thing about this project is that they're repurposing cheap ip camera hardware to work as surprisingly decent, low latency digital video system for fpv drones:<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wZAHkWHfBF4">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wZAHkWHfBF4</a><p>Mostly a continuation of the OpenHD project. But it's quite promising.
Related: I was hacking Ambarella action cameras a while back: <a href="https://github.com/petabyt/liemoth">https://github.com/petabyt/liemoth</a><p>Eventually I stopped not because of how low quality action cameras were, there were hundreds of different vendors publishing rebranded Chinese cheap cams. And not to mention how crap the firmware is. The whole thing gets hot and the battery only lasts a few minutes.
Related:<p><i>OpenIPC: Alternative open firmware for your IP camera</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35975383">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35975383</a> - May 2023 (1 comment)
I was really hoping that the Pine64 PineCube cameras would gain traction in this space, but it seems like they only ever really shipped small batches of them. They'd need an enclosure/software to make them a reasonable choice.<p>Wiki: <a href="https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineCube" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineCube</a>
Another IP Camera thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36447024">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36447024</a>
OpenIPC is one of those projects where the core team is Russian, and their communication is Russian, and they use Telegram (or a bridge) for everything. As a non-Russian speaker you're pretty lost trying to contribute, and as a result they attract hardly anyone outside the russosphere. I've tried telling them they're artifically limiting their project, but was predictably ignored. This project has so much potential, but it will never be achieved.<p>I've seen this before; projects like that tend to stagnate and die. Openinkpot comes to mind.<p>BTW not a rant against Russians; open source projects do best when they have a lot of contributors from across the world, and that means English.