Network Optics - Nx Witness VMS integration

Third party integrations
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Would love to see this

3 Likes
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I’ve just been digging into this - would you recommend it?

How much was pricing? I can’t see to dig it up online.

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Anything further on NX integration?

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I didn’t find any solution for it.

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I`m currently investigating NX Witnes and would like to learn about an HomeAssistant integration for it

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I’ve jumped back into setting up Nx Witness, great VMS, anyone made any progress linking it with home assistant?

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I’ve been using NX witness in one form or another for a few years now. Solid VMS product. To answer some of the questions in here regarding pricing and availability. NX witness is available in the US as two rebranded versions. DW Spectrum and Hanwha Wave. Both of these branded products have NX witness as the core platform with some additional features added on for their respective brands of cameras. Licensing is sold per camera and is perpetual. typical street price is anywhere between 90-120 per camera (depending on the reseller)

I have just recently installed Home Assistant (coming from hubitat). Witness does have access to rtsp streams through their api. You can also have outside programs trigger events within the VMS through the api. I have an automation in HA running when someone presses a zigbee button (doorbell), it will create an event in witness.

Witness also has the option of using soft triggers / on screen buttons to generate an http post/get. I tried going direct to the REST api in HA, but there seems to be an issue with how witness handles headers. For now, i worked around it by installing the node-red add in and using a http-in node to trigger actions in HA.

1 Like
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Thanks for sharing pricing - I finally found a reseller to request pricing in the AU market it’s around $199 to start with 4 cameras then $150 extra per camera.

Worth noting this only required if you wish to record. So I’ve added 12+ cameras. I’m planning on keeping my Qnap nvr recording 8 that rarely need footage to be reviewed and paying for the ones I frequently check - nx witness is lightning fast!!!

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@wermskates

I’m also trying to access the streams from nx but running into auth issues? Did you find this?

Was it easy implementing events? Love to see the code You used so I can get it working too!!

Have you setup the basic intel people detection? It’s ok - I’m wondering the pricing on all the other plugins if there is any suitable for home use (price wise)

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@Stewface

I don’t know how it works out in the end and whether or not they’ll sell to you being in AU…but generally speaking these are some of the lowest prices i’ve seen for DW spectrum licensing.

123Security

I have done some experimentation with the intel based people detection. It isn’t bad…but it is also not great. Most of the industry seems to be moving towards edge based detection. The onboard analytics are continuing to be pushed as a primary feature of the cameras. Hanwha, Axis, and DW are all moving towards camera based as the first line of analytics. Their VMS platforms also reflect this as they don’t have a robust system in place on the server side by default.

There was a shift in how NX witness handles authentication a few versions back. Previously you could just do basic authentication in a url “rtsp://username:password@serveraddressxxxxxx” but they have now switched to token based.

Can you give me an example of what exactly you’re trying to do with the witness api? Are you trying to just pull a feed from one of the RTSP streams?

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Hi guys

this is just to let you know In also very interested in DW integration and am following your discussion.

In general it is quite easy to trigger DW via DW “generic events”

I believe you can easily get 4 free licenses for 30 days at DW from within the VMS

B&H Photo has nearly as good pricing and is very reliable

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1080311-REG/digital_watchdog_dw_spectrumlsc010_10_dw_spectrum_ipvms.html

Thanks

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Thanks @wermskates

The prices at 123security are similar to what I would pay over here after FX $89 ~ $136 AUD, only marginally cheaper certainly not worth risking to find out it doesn’t work.

I got my auth issue resolved in the nX forums, there is a small setting you need to turn on to login, reply is here:

I haven’t worked out what I want to do yet, need to figure out what is possible, if I could find a reasonably priced plugin that does accurate people / object / face detection pushing these events into HA could be very handy.

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Thanks for the info on the authentication. that’ll be good to know for future use.

as far as generic events…this is how i implemented it in HA

I am not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to implementation of json or scripting. do not take this example as a good example of how to execute…just one that has worked for me so far.

I created a simple bash script that is located in the /config/shell directory in HA. that bash script is called by HA when needed with a shell command line added into the configuration.yaml


shell_command:
  wave: bash /config/shell/wave.sh

Contents of the script.

#!/bin/bash
curl --insecure -X POST "https://192.111.111.111:7001/api/createEvent" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer AUTHKEYGOESHERE" -d  "{\"caption\":\"Doorbell Pressed\",\"description\":\"Doorbell Pressed\",\"metadata\":{\"cameraRefs\":[\"CAMERAIDGOESHERE\"]}}"

The script is pretty straight forward. you would just input the relevant details to your installation. Server ip / port. auth key, and camera information.

now the part that i need to fix / work on is generating the key. The plan is eventually to have the script check to see if a session exists first. if it doesn’t, then it will generate a key. The key is supposed to last for 100 days currently. I just executed this manually in a ubuntu terminal window to create the session and then copied the key into my script. Note that if you’re running this in windows some of the formatting for the curl will be different.

curl --insecure -X POST "https://192.111.111.111:7001/rest/v2/login/sessions" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"username": "USERNAME", "password": "PASSWORD", "setCookie": true}'
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The company I work for builds custom DVRs with DW Spectrum or Milestone installed. I can probably confirm a couple of things here.

As far as I know the software licenses are not region locked, however they are brand locked. So an Nx Witness license will only work on the Nx Witness software. DW Spectrum licenses will only work on DW Spectrum software.

Unfortunately I don’t know of a good generic solution yet that works for any camera and doesn’t also require a cloud service. Digital Watchdog makes their own line of BlackJack A.I. servers with internal hardware and a plugin to run it, but they won’t sell it separately. At least not yet. I don’t yet know if it uses a generic GPU or a machine learning accelerator.

So for the moment we are using the edge type of setup with A.I. cameras from Axis and Digital Watchdog that can pass their metadata over to DW Spectrum.

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Can anyone show how to Integrate NX Witness or camera streams into HA.
I’m very new and only basic knowledge.
Cheers

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Yes would love to see a guide! I would be willing to fund development here

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If I can help anyone here with NX Witness support or licenses just send me a DM. We are an NX Witness integrator and can give you better pricing than B&H etc …

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Do you know if the NX Witness side of things have an option similar to the Digital Watchdog Blackjack AI units? Basically server side analytics. Is whatever they are doing a proprietary solution for Digital Watchdog or is there an off the shelf solution that works with NX Witness?

I’m wondering if DW is using something like the Google Coral M.2 A.I accelerator keys like the Frigate DVR uses.

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Do you know if the NX Witness side of things have an option similar to the Digital Watchdog Blackjack AI units ? Basically server side analytics.

@DataMeister @Stewface There is a plugin available that can do server based analytics with Nx Witness. I’ve done a lot of work with it - as a minimum it’ll run on Intel CPU with OpenVINO support, but ideally you’d use some sort of acceleration (ie. Hailo or NVIDIA).

DM me and I can give more details and help you get a demo running.

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Also some extra info for anyone trying to get Nx Witness camera streams into HA - here are some steps:

  • Create a ‘Digest’ user in Nx Witness with Live Viewer Access - instructions below are for version 5, but version 6 is similar:
    https://support.networkoptix.com/hc/en-us/articles/7724435803415-How-to-Enable-Digest-Authentication-for-3rd-Party-Applications

  • Add a ‘Generic Camera’ device in HA using the following format for URLs:

  • Still Image URL - https://{server ip}:7001/ec2/cameraThumbnail?cameraId={camera id}&time=now

  • Stream Source URL - rtsp://{server ip}:7001/{camera id}?stream=1
    This is the low res stream - use stream=0 for high res

  • Choose ‘digest’ for authentication and enter the user/password you created earlier.

  • Make sure you uncheck the ‘Verify SSL certificate’ option unless you’re using a custom cert for your Nx Server.