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Affected Roles: System Owner • System Administrator
Related DW Spectrum VMS Apps: DW Spectrum Server
Difficulty: Medium
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Overview
Sometimes there is a necessity to have a more detailed description of resource capabilities in addition to parameters discovered via API either proprietary or ONVIF standard. This article describes the approach used to address such cases in the way ensuring responsive, quick and seamless deployment for customers.
All the additional devices descriptions, parameters and peculiarities currently available are stored in special online accessible resource capabilities file. The data in the file is specified by vendor, device 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 put to the file. Once changes are reviewed and accepted, they become available online in several hours or days. The support agent notifies the customer on availability. The customer restarts the Server. On Server start it checks the version of online file and compares to that in the built-in one. The newer version of the capabilities file is applied.
If Server has no access to the Internet all the requested device capabilities will be included in monthly patch and applied on update of DW Spectrum.
On the urgent incidents technical support engineer once requested can fix the problem locally.
Several most commonly faced examples are presented hereafter.
Analog encoder license
One of the most powerful features of DW Spectrum is the possibility to stream from an analog encoder with analog cameras. By default, the PRO license is applied to new device in the System. There are analog encoder licenses on lower price which can be applied to such device. If the customer has legacy analog-based system and wants to switch to DW Spectrum it is possible to connect analog encoder to the System and apply an analog encoder license.
Multi-sensor cameras
By default, physical multi-sensor camera once is discovered consumes one PRO digital encoder license per sensor. Thus four-sensor camera would consume four licenses. All the currently supported multi-sensor cameras are registered in capabilities file and consume one license per physical device allowing streams be recorded from all the sensors.
This capability can be enabled for any new model of multi-sensor device on request to Technical support.
Advanced PTZ
For details on PTZ refer this article
Advanced PTZ is available for a camera if it
- supports AbsoluteMove command,
- 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.
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.
https://digital-watchdog.com/page/integrationlist/
The process of information updating in the site is following.
- Information on new devices with type encoder/multisensor/dvr is gathered from anonymous reports on the Statistics Server.
- Each device is manually verified and approved.
- Periodically information on all the approved devices is copied to ipvd.networkoptix.com database.
- At this step information is not yet integrated to DW Spectrum but is publicly available for review.
- Once a month the capabilities file is updated with this information and becomes available in monthly patch.
- (optional) The new capabilities could be requested at step 4 by contacting Technical support. The capabilities file will be updated.
