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December 17, 2004

Linksys WVC11B Redux

In an earlier post here and on unmediated I talked about how I hoped that Linksys WVC11B and WVC54G wireless cameras that claim MPEG-4 support lived up to their promises.

Well, I was given one as a gift and sadly out of the box they don't support true MPEG-4 streaming. What they have is an Active X control that displays some variant of Microsoft's MPEG-4 codec. After doing some port scans, as suggested in the comments of one of the posts, I can confirm that they do not have any network services running other than httpd (port 80). Also strange is that I am unable to view the streams from Windows Media Player on the Mac or PC but I am able to view the stream via mPlayer on the Mac.. Otherwise, IE on the PC is the only other way to view the streams (no Mac support for the ActiveX control).

Thankfully the firmware is open source! Let the hacking begin!

Posted by vanevery at 01:40 AM

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Comments

Hi there,

I was looking on how to use the lInksys wvc54g camera on the Mac, and found your article.

Downloaded mPlayer for OSX, and tested it, but still can't get it to connect and stream video.

Could you please point me to the right direction?

Thanks, and much appreicated.

Posted by: Parvinder at December 27, 2004 09:35 AM

OK, I bit before I read this. Now what can I do with this thing? Has anyone hacked it yet? I would like it to take a shot every 20-30 sec and FTP that to my web site and then refresh the page. The refresh part is a snap. I just need the camera to do it's part. Any help out there?
Send me a message soon if you have an answer.
srhodes@jestkidding.com
Thanks.

Posted by: Sheldon at January 19, 2005 02:54 PM

You can always open the URL : http://YourWebCam/img/video.asf and that is an MPEG-4 stream that can be directly streamed by Microsoft Media Player... now of course I would like something more Linux friendly, myself. :)

Gilles.

Posted by: ggravier at February 26, 2005 05:28 AM

careful.. Yes, the video.asf link is a video stream (of sorts) but not an MPEG-4 stream.

Posted by: Shawn Van Every at February 26, 2005 01:08 PM

you can get motion Jpeg also
from the URLs

http://<YourWebCam>/img/mjpeg.jpg
http://<YourWebCam>/img/mjpeg.cgi

you can view it from javamain.html

http://<YourWebCam>/img/image.cgi?next_file=javamain.html

if you look at the html source for Image Tab under the Setup section you will see the options for it commented out.

Posted by: Evil Pete at February 28, 2005 01:18 PM

Pete,

Are you sure you are using a WVC11B? The one that I have does not have any of what you suggest. Perhaps you have a WVC54G..? Perhaps you have a newer version of the firmware?

Let me know..

Posted by: Shawn Van Every at February 28, 2005 01:45 PM

turns out that Pete was in fact talking about the WVC54G..

Posted by: Shawn Van Every at February 28, 2005 06:23 PM

I need crack the camera wvc11b, but I can't find the code where detect the movement; I have been examing a long time, but I can not get it. I'd like to find where the motion detection is done, anybody can help me please? thanks

Posted by: okuppa at March 2, 2005 06:43 AM

Hi Shawn,

Have u managed to hack the firmware of WVC54G? How do u hack it? Linksys provides the GPL codes, but they are in the form of makefiles and I do not know how to compile it to C++ source and header files. Pls help me out.

Thanks a buncha.
alwayz

Posted by: alwayz at December 18, 2005 06:01 AM