By Steve Mitchell, Director of Engineering, MultiSight
Over the past several years, mobile clients such as smartphone and tablet apps have become a common method to access video on DVRs and video cameras. Most video recorders or video recording software is accompanied by an app which, along with some configuration on site, can be used to access live or recorded video.
Things get tricky when the recorder is behind a firewall, and remote to the mobile client. That is, if your smartphone is on 4G/LTE or you’re on a different wifi network than the recorder, you must configure the recorder and your firewall to enable remote access. Typically you’ll also need to figure out how to instruct your mobile client to contact the recorder with appropriate internet addresses, port numbers, etc.
This is a solution that’s possible, but not practical — especially at large scale, when you are trying to manage video from dozens or hundreds of retail locations. Imagine installing recording software or video recorder hardware at hundreds of retail locations, then configuring the firewalls in all of those locations with port forwarding and dynamic DNS. Then typing the address of each recorder into all of the mobile clients for all the people that want access to these locations.
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