Implementing ONVIF for Axis Cameras

•Published May 17, 2010 00:00 AM

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From our testing and review with Axis, an important and non-obvious procedure is necessary to ensure ONVIF support is implemented directly. As Axis describes:

"If an Axis camera with ONVIF support is first used in an ONVIF environment, the ONVIF interface is automatically enabled. If an Axis camera first is used in a VAPIX environment, ONVIF is automatically disabled."

This is the only 1 of the 4 cameras supporting 'standards' that acts in this manner. Because of this, it is fairly easy to block ONVIF connections (especially, if like us, you previously connected to the camera via it's web interface).

Axis recommends a few steps to address this:

Open a link with the following structure: http://<IPAddress>/axis-cgi/param.cgi?action=update&Properties.API.WebService.WebService=yes
Factory reset the camera
A third, multi-step process is available but it is quite detailed and we were not able to get this to work (as such we recommend the above steps)

Axis notes that, "are working on making this choice / possibility even clearer in the Axis product range." We hope so because the current setup is neither clear nor intuitive.

That noted, we were now able to connect the Axis camera successfully to the Brickcom VMS software - a limitation we had noted in our April 2010 'standards' readiness update.