Resource capabilities update online

Overview

Sometimes it is necessary to have a more detailed description of resource capabilities in addition to the parameters discovered through an API (either proprietary or ONVIF standard). This article describes the approach used to address such cases in a way which ensures a quick, responsive, and seamless deployment for customers.

All additional devices descriptions, parameters, and peculiarities currently available are stored in an online resource capabilities file. The data in the file is specified by the device vendor, model, and firmware version. This file benefit is not restricted just to occasions when device incorrectly reports its characteristics which have to be fixed, but is used for enabling certain device capability as well. 

To include a feature the customer should send a request to technical support providing device vendor, model, and firmware version. The appropriate changes are made to the file. Once changes are reviewed and accepted, they become available online in several hours or days. The support agent notifies the customer upon availability. When the customer restarts the Server, it checks the version of the online file and compares it to the built-in one. The newer version of the capabilities file is kept.

If the Server has no access to the internet, all the requested device capabilities will be included in a monthly patch and applied on update of Nx Witness. 

In urgent situations, contact a technical support engineer to have the problem fixed locally.

What are some common examples?

Analog encoder license

One of the most powerful features of Nx Witness is the capability to stream from an NVR with analog cameras. By default, the PRO license is applied to a new device in the System. There are analog encoder licenses at a lower price which can be applied to such NVRs. If the customer has a legacy NVR based system and wants to switch to Nx Witness, it is possible to connect the NVR to the System and apply an analog encoder license. 

The greatest beneficiaries of such an approach are those willing to use legacy NVR. What is needed is just to contact technical support and ask to enable an analog license for a particular NVR model.

Multi-sensor cameras 

By default, once a physical multi-sensor camera is discovered, it will utilize one PRO digital encoder license per sensor. As a result, a four-sensor camera will utilize four licenses. All currently supported multisensor cameras are registered in the capabilities file and utilize one license per physical device, allowing streams to be recorded from all the sensors.

This capability can be enabled for any new multi-sensor model on request to Technical support.

Advanced PTZ 

For details on PTZ refer to THIS article. 

Advanced PTZ is available for a camera if it 

• Supports AbsoluteMove command; and
• Is able to return current coordinates.

Once a PTZ camera has been calibrated for Advanced PTZ support, the standard PTZ icon on a camera will be used to activate and utilize the Advanced PTZ feature.

Advanced PTZ is an on-demand feature and has to be implemented individually for new camera models by requesting assistance from the Technical Support team.

Device input/output fixes

There are several types of such fixes preconfigured for specific devices, for example when input/output signal levels are reversed: on event there is a zero level signal.

List of Supported IP Video Devices

https://nxvms.com/ipvd

The process of updating the list of supported IP Video Devices is the following.

1. Information on new devices with type encoder/multisensor/dvr is gathered from anonymous reports on the Statistics Server.
2. Each device is manually verified and approved.
3. Information on all the approved devices is periodically copied to the ipvd.networkoptix.com database.
4. At this step information is not yet integrated to Nx Witness but is publicly available for review. 
5. Once a month the capabilities file is updated with this information and becomes available in the monthly patch.
6. (optional) The new capabilities could be requested at step 4 by contacting Technical Support. The capabilities file will be updated right away.

Questions

If you have any questions related to this topic or you want to share your experience with other community members or our team, please visit and engage in our support community or reach out to your local reseller.