To stream a camera / webcam on your website, there are two ways:
(1) Upload your camera footage to the cloud, then stream the footage from the cloud.
CameraFTP uses this method. The advantages are:
- It supports a lot of concurrent connections; (most IP cameras can only support 1 or few concurrent connections.)
- It does not require a lot of upload bandwidth on your camera end. (Most consumer Internet services are asymmetric, the upload bandwidth is much smaller than the download bandwidth).
- It supports both live view and playback.
- It is very secure as your camera is not accessed from the cloud. Your camera can be protected by your firewall/router. You don't need to open any ports, and you don't need a static IP / DDNS service.
Please visit this page for detailed info about how to publish your camera and embed it into your own web page:
https://www.cameraftp.com/camera/knowledgebase/howtoPublishCamera.aspx
(2) Directly stream the camera video without cloud recording. There are two options:
(a) If the camera supports RTSP, you can directly stream the RTSP video. But it has 4 disadvantages as mentioned above (i.e. the opposite of the above advantages).
(b) Use P2P based video streaming. It has the first 3 disadvantages mentioned above. However, CameraFTP cannot support it for regular IP cameras/DVRs. CameraFTP can support it if you use our software or mobile app based virtual security cameras (e.g. CameraFTP VSS, Mobile Security Camera, Webcam Security Camera). Please visit our software page. For these virtual security cameras, CameraFTP supports P2P based video streaming directly from your camera with or without cloud recording. However, we currently don't support it for public cameras.
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Now back to Method 1: Upload your camera footage to the cloud, then stream the footage from the cloud.
If you want to stream video, then you must order a video recording plan instead of image recording plan. If you want to stream video continuously, then you need to order a continuous video recording plan.
For many scenes, such as construction sites or parks, users may not need video streaming. They just want to display an image every few minutes. If so, image recording is better.
Lastly, for cameras in a remote location with no high speed Internet connection, e.g. cameras that use 4G/3G connections, you can minimize the bandwidth usage by lowering the image upload frequency / video frame rate and bit rate.
