Wouldn't it be nice to have a 'universal' IP camera discovery tool? One that finds any camera regardless of brand, type and IP address?
Below is a screenshot of IP Search Tool. This is the installation tool for Longse camera's and made by Herospeed (herospeed.net). Windows didn't like me installing this piece of software and warned me for it. As usual, i neglected that warning and went ahead whit it (on a demo machine of course).
It's not (yet) what i described above, there are a few flaws and its not perfect. On the other hand, it's the first one i saw that shows Longse (of course), Arecont Vision, Sony, Axis and an 'unknown' (it's a Vivotek in this case) brand camera in the same discovery process. Maybe there are other tools out there that do this but this is the first one i've actually seen doing it.
The Axis camera shows up a bit weird in the device name and the IP address is wrong, should also be in the 192.168.220.x range so that's not good.
As mentioned 'networkcamera' is a Vivotek camera of which it doesn't show the brand correctly but it finds the camera and you can get to it.
It does show the Longse camera 'IPC' although it's on a different subnet. Not unique but nice anyway. I tried the same with the Sony and moved that to a different subnet. As could be expected, it didn't find it anymore. :-(
Of course, changing the IP address etc on the right hand side of the screen only works for the Longse camera. if you try to do that for another brand, the program will terminate with an error.
Although it's not perfect, it can be usefull to find camera's in an unknown network for instance. Sure, a network scanner like Advanced IP Scanner can do that to but that will give you all networked devices, not only the camera's. if you have a lot of networked devices this tool might be a faster approach. Also, it will find Longse camera's in different subnets which a network scanner won't.
Bottom line: will still have to wait for one that can detect all camera's on all subnets and displays all information correct. I guess i'll have to keep dreaming of that one just a litle bit longer but then again, it's nice to have dreams :-)
